With the advent of social networking sites, becoming more popular is as easy as crafting a few lines of JavaScript code, it seems.
One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, samy is my hero had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community.
How did Samy transcend his humble beginnings of only 73 friends to become a veritable global celebrity? The answer is a combination of XSS tricks and lax security in certain Web browsers.