Twitter hacker was 17-year-old boy

A code that brought Twitter to its knees yesterday has been traced to an Australian high schooler named Pearce Delphin.

Delphin says that he unleashed a “mouseover” code on Twitter just to see if it could be done. The code generates a pop-up window when users drag their cursor over it. Within minutes of his posting it hackers around the world were copying and modifying the code, spreading it through Twitter’s 145 million-strong network, and causing users to be redirected to Japanese porn sites and creating “worm” tweets that replicated themselves each time they were read. The account belonging White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was among those infected. Gibbs unwittingly sent out a string of code to his followers. Delphin said he hasn’t done anything illegal and merely exposed a vulnerability on the site. You can follow him @zzap.