Samy Kamkar

Samy Kamkar
Kamkar speaking at the Black Hat conference in 2010.
Born	(1985-12-10) December 10, 1985 (age 31)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Privacy and security researcher, computer hacker, whistleblower and entrepreneur
Known for	Releasing the Samy worm, Evercookie, SkyJack, and iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile phone tracking research
Website	samy.pl

Samy Kamkar (born December 10, 1985) is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker, whistleblower and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, Kamkar dropped out of high school and one year later, co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company based on open source software, which raised over $46 million in private funding. He is possibly best known for creating and releasing the fastest spreading virus of all time, the MySpace worm Samy, and being subsequently raided for it by the United States Secret Service, under the Patriot Act. He is also known for creating SkyJack, a custom drone which hacks into any nearby Parrot drones allowing them to be controlled by its operator, and for creating the Evercookie, which appeared in a top-secret NSA document revealed by Edward Snowden and on the front page of The New York Times. He is also known for his work with The Wall Street Journal and his discovery of the illicit mobile phone tracking where the Apple iPhone, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone mobile devices transmit GPS and Wi-Fi information to their parent companies. His mobile research led to a series of class-action lawsuits against the companies and a privacy hearing on Capitol Hill.

In 2005, Kamkar released the Samy worm, the first self-propagating cross-site scripting worm, onto MySpace. The worm carried a payload that would display the string "but most of all, Samy is my hero" on a victim's profile and cause the victim to unknowingly send a friend request to Kamkar. When a user viewed that profile, they would have the payload planted on their page. Within just 20 hours of its October 4, 2005 release, over one million users had run the payload, making it the fastest spreading virus of all time. The MySpace team temporarily shut down MySpace to fix the problem that allowed the worm to operate.