Samy Kamkar
More info
- Known for
- Samy worm, evercookie, OpenSesame, RollJam, PoisonTap
The hacker whose 2005 MySpace worm earned him over a million friends in under a day, plus a criminal conviction.
On 4 October 2005 Kamkar planted XSS code in his MySpace profile. Every visitor added him as a friend, got "but most of all, samy is my hero" pasted onto their own profile, and became a carrier in turn. Within about 20 hours it had spread to more than a million accounts and MySpace had to take the site down. It was the first major self-propagating XSS worm. Kamkar pleaded guilty in 2007 and got three years' probation.
He then became known for public demos: evercookie (2010), a cookie that survives nearly every attempt to delete it; OpenSesame, which opens garage doors with a Mattel toy; RollJam against keyless car entry; and PoisonTap (2016), which hijacks a locked computer over USB.