The MySpace Worm Saga

This write-up about the Flying Spaghetti Monster worm that struck MySpace was originally posted on 07/07/06 by me as a blog entry on MySpace. My account has since been terminated. I believe that I was deleted because of my criticism of the way MySpace handled this situation. The saga of my account termination will be detailed in an upcoming write-up. For now, I will just republish all of my blog entries that got deleted with that account. This whole situation is retardedly funny.

Some of you may have noticed a new MySpace page that is getting popular pretty damn quick. And, if you haven’t noticed the page itself, I’m sure you’ve seen some strange updates to your friend’s pages. Across the tops of thousands of profiles is an area with the text:

“The Flying Spaghetti Monster Lives | I have been touched by His Noodly Appendage | Join the Pastafarians | Bring back the pirates!
Add me as a friend”

The “Add me as a friend” is a hyperlink to send a friend invite to The Flying Spaghetti Monster’s MySpace page. (it’ll probably be deleted by MySpace by the time I finish typing this out).

And, in the “books” section underneath interests you’ll notice the text: “The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” which is linked to Venganza.org.

WTF is going on?!??!?!

Technically:
Welcome to a new spin on the “Samy is my Hero” MySpace worm: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s pretty much the exact same thing, but it’s being chauffeured around in a new vehicle. I was intentionally vague about how the fake porn site virus guy is redirecting traffic, but this pretty much ruins keeping that cat in the bag. People are using embedded flash files to do all of this stuff. If you’re unfamiliar with the “Samy is my Hero” worm, you can read all about it here: Samy’s Site.

Wow? Are these dudes like super duper computer hackers or what?
hmm… Depends on how you define that. They aren’t stupid by any means, but what they are doing technically could easily be handled by Mike Davidson, Shawn Inman, and countless others in their sleep. It’s clever, but not a huge technical feat by any means. That’s really what “hacking” usually is though. Finding a weakness and applying basic stuff to exploit it.

Reasoning behind this:
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the God of a parody religion founded by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design creationism as an alternative to biological evolution. In other words, Bobby thinks that the idea of a supreme being is so ridiculous that he has created his own goofy religion to poke fun at people who believe in God.

Is Bobby behind this?
Not sure. I have no clue who is really behind this. Hell, it might even be Samy. I doubt that though, he’s still glowingly happy that he didn’t get sued or jailed for his little hero stunt. Interestingly enough, when you visit the sub-domain of the url that the Flash file is being served from (yourspace.50webs.org) it is a nearly blank page which simply reads: “Welcome, This is Samy’s site. There is not much here right now. Perhaps there will be something later. Perhaps not.” I think this is probably just someone paying homage to Samy for being the originator of this idea though. Samy, if it is you: I feel sorry for your ass. I don’t think MySpace will be as forgiving on a second go-around. You’ll always be my hero though. lol

It’s most likely just someone or a small group of people who feel like making a statement by spreading the gospel of The Holy Noodleness. And, sure enough: it’s working. Bobby’s site is sure to get major exposure over this and gain a ton of new followers and proponents.

I’ve been infected, how do I get rid of this crap?
There is no need to change your password or anything like that. These guys are not doing this to be malicious. Unless, you consider losing everything that was in your book section as a grave injustice.

Simply click “Edit Profile” from your MySpace homepage and remove all the code that is in your “books” section. If they update the flash file to inject code elsewhere, I’ll update this blog entry to tell you what else you need to remove. As of now, removing everything from “books” is the fix.
_____________________

UPDATE
The saga of the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster MySpace Worm’ continues, kinda. MySpace removed the page shortly after I posted the above. And, 50web.org has since terminated the hosting account the Flash files were being embedded from. The worm is dead.

Right after I started looking into this, I saved a full copy of that MySpace page when it was only up to 12,971 friends. If you’d like to take a look, it can be found here: The Flying Spaghetti Monster Worm MySpace Page.

How many MySpace pages were infected before it died off?
Not sure. I’d have to guesstimate that it was somewhere between 40 and 100 thousand pages.

Why are you bothering with an update?
Because something fairly interesting did go down. Not long after that page was deleted I started seeing the below bulletin getting a fair amount of circulation:

“Tom you fucking ASSHOLE!

You deleted my GOD’s myspace!

What happened to freedom of religion?

The Flying Spaghetti Monster had two myspace profiles. One was a permanent normal myspace profile. The other one was a temporary disposable one most likely created by radical fundamentalist pastafarians, and it was connected to that viral banner thingy. Fair enough to delete that one, but you can’t delete both! In hindsight it might have been Christian hackers(lol) who had an evil plan to get the Flying Spaghetti Monster off myspace.

Tom you will burn in Hell! The All-powerful Flying Spaghetti Monster will smite thee!

If anyone doesn’t know about the true GOD (yes, our GOD has three caps) go here:

The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Please, for the love of Truth and Reason, Repost this bulletin so that the atrocities committed by Tom do not go unnoticed!

Praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

in the name of GOD,
the_avenging_bucket”

At first, I assumed that the other ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster’ MySpace page was created by Bobby, the founder of the religion. If so, why would MySpace delete it? It is pretty obvious that Bobby was in no way connected with the worm. I still stand by my original thought that it was the product of some overzealous supporter of the religion. That’s right folks, even the Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster has hardcore fundamentalists screwing things up for them.

To satisfy my curiosity, I sent Bobby an e-mail asking if that other MySpace page that got the axe was his. Well, it wasn’t. It was created by some supporters of FSM. As far as I know, it was just used as a gathering point for supporters and it had nothing at all to do with the worm account. If I’m correct in saying that, it’s pretty screwed-up that MySpace deleted the account. They certainly wouldn’t delete Paris Hilton’s account if a “That’s Hot!” worm struck. One thing is for sure though: this couldn’t get any funnier unless some drunken midget strippers came into play.

How’s Bobby feel feel about this worm?
He’s pretty pissed off. Here’s some quotes from our e-mail convo:

“There is actually no *real* FSM profile on myspace - I’ve never made one. I don’t even have a personal myspace page, other than one my girlfriend put up as a joke.”

“As for the worm itself, I’m pretty upset about it. And even more so because of the literally hundreds of emails I’ve received from angry myspace users that think I’m behind this. For the record, I had nothing to do with it, and I don’t approve of it.”

“This did not help the cause; it just pissed off a bunch of people and probably turned thousands away from FSM in the process. It makes my head want to explode.”

“One last thing - the myspace worm did NOT help. Traffic may have gone up, but Amazon.com book sales went down, and I’m not at all surprised.”

Right after he started receiving e-mails about the worm he looked into it and even posted this page with info on how to remove it.

In summary
MySpace got hit with a Flying Spaghetti Monster worm; based on the code originally made by Samy (AKA everyone’s hero), by some religious fundamentalists who were acting outside of their leadership. And, an innocent Spaghetti Monster was caught in the crossfire.

There really is no place like MySpace.
___________________

Shortly after posting the update section of the above I was plugged by Fark.com. Thanks Drew and gang. :-)

Not long after that, my MySpace account was terminated. Was it because I openly criticised MySpace for deleting that other Spaghetti Monster account? Probably so. I can’t think of anything else that could have gotten me terminated. My MySpace blog was read by a ton of people because I regularly updated everyone on all the scams, marketing ploys, and hustles that MySpace is infested with. Someone from their organization even contacted a couple weeks ago and asked for my advice on what to do about the huge problem they have with fake profiles being used to market adult sites. The full story of my lackluster MySpace experience will be detailed as soon as the dust settles on this.
___________________

Update:
My MySpace account has since been restored. I’m still going to put a copy of all of my blog entries from over there onto BurntPickle pretty soon.