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WE SPECIALISE IN DIGITAL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT. WE DELIVER A RANGE OF ONLINE SOLUTIONS FROM BANNER CAMPAIGNS TO COMPLEX WEBSITE DESIGNS AND APPLICATION BUILDS.

NEWS

On October 4, 2005, around 3am, Samy Kamkar logged on to MySpace. He began the day with 73 friends. At around 11am, he had about 200 friends. Just 2 hours later he had 1,000 friends. A couple more hours pass and his friends list had grown to 200,000. By 10:30pm, Samy Kamkar had over 1 million friends. It was at this point that MySpace was forced offline.

How did Samy become so popular? It’s simple. He wrote a piece of code which he put on his profile page which ensured that every time somebody visited his profile page, they automatically (and without any knowledge or consent from MySpace) added Samy to their friends list. This in turn ensured that anyone who was added to Samy’s friend’s list, now had the code on their profile page. Now, anybody that visited anyone’s page that has the code on it would be added to Samy’s friends list, exponentially growing list of Samy's friends.

This story highlights the necessity of good programming when it comes to building anything that allows users to upload content, be it a forum, or any kind of comments system. Whilst everyone should be able to use popular systems available for your social media/blog etc solutions, be aware and understand that they do have vulnerabilities, and there are no limit to the supply of people online with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do than to mess with your website.

The consequences of Samy's actions? He got 3 years of probation, 90 days of community service, and an undisclosed amount of restitution to MySpace. Samy was just 19 when he made the worm.