Twitter hit by Easter worms

Twitter has been hit with a bout of worm attacks over the Easter weekend which led to thousands of tweets being deleted to contain the viruses.

The attacks started on Saturday 12 April and continued through to Easter Monday.

The worms are claimed to be the creation of Michael 'Mikeyy' Mooney, the 17-year-old website developer of StalkDaily, a Twitter-copycat site.

Four malicious accounts were initially created to spread the worm. The worm was embedded in messages promoting the StalkDaily website, which is now offline.

Follow celebrities on Twitter

The worm spread through referral tweets which infected users' profiles, in turn spreading spam style messages and infecting other users.

Twitter assured members on its blog that it had "taken steps to remove the offending updates, and to close the holes that allowed this 'worm' to spread".

"No passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information were compromised as part of this attack," Twitter insisted.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog that 10,000 tweets that could have continued to spread the worm were deleted and the micro-blogging site is still on alert.

Free Twitter tools and applications

"We are still reviewing all the details, cleaning up, and we remain on alert. Every time we battle an attack, we evaluate our web-coding practices to learn how we can do better to prevent them in the future," Stone wrote.

"We will conduct a full review of the weekend activities. Everything from how it happened, how we reacted, and preventative measures will be covered," he added.