Samy worm DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy says he wrote the virus that became the MySpace worm; Jack identifies it as the Samy worm.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I realize oops, I just wrote a virus.”
Episode
17 March 2020 Official episode · Official transcript
black hat research
Samy Kamkar describes his early game-cheat development, the self-propagating MySpace worm, his prosecution, and later security research involving payment cards, side channels, browser tracking, drones, geolocation, and access control.
Topics: Game-cheat development and anti-cheat evasion, Packet sniffing, memory injection, and DLL function hooking, Client-side validation bypass and direct API interaction, Cross-site scripting and browser JavaScript execution, Self-propagating web worms, NFC and RFID payment-card security, Timing, power, and acoustic side-channel attacks, Persistent browser tracking and multi-storage identifiers, Wireless drone hijacking and encryption-key recovery, Wireless MAC-address geolocation and trilateration, Mobile-device location collection, Traffic-data spoofing, Responsible disclosure and public proof-of-concept releases, Cryptographic access control for buildings
Links published on the Darknet Diaries episode page. Not LLM output.
Qualified statements from this episode, not graph facts.
Samy worm DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy says he wrote the virus that became the MySpace worm; Jack identifies it as the Samy worm.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I realize oops, I just wrote a virus.”
MySpace worm INVOLVES Samy worm
The MySpace incident involved the self-spreading Samy worm.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“Samy has just created a MySpace worm and it’s spreading”
MySpace worm INVOLVES MySpace
The incident affected the MySpace website, eventually taking the whole site offline.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“the whole site is down; the whole team is here working on it”
Samy worm USES cross-site scripting
The worm propagated by causing profile visitors' browsers to execute JavaScript through a MySpace profile injection.
Derived Confidence 96% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“the code to add Samy as a friend was copied to that person’s profile”
Samy worm USES JavaScript
The worm used JavaScript that executed in visitors' browsers and copied itself to their profiles.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“he could get whoever visited his profile to execute the JavaScript code that he wrote”
Samy worm USES lateral movement
The worm self-propagated from profile to profile through visitors who acquired the code.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“It just kept spreading.”
Samy Kamkar USES Counter-Strike
Samy played Counter-Strike and investigated its audio and process behavior to create cheats.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“Counter-Strike was his favorite game”
Samy Kamkar USES packet sniffing
Samy used packet sniffing while analyzing Counter-Strike information.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I started learning about packet sniffing”
Samy Kamkar USES memory injection
Samy used memory injection while developing Counter-Strike cheats.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“and then memory injection”
Samy Kamkar USES DLL function hooking
Samy intercepted function calls within Counter-Strike DLLs to obtain positional information and alter game rendering.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“intercepting function calls within the DLLs of Counter-Strike itself”
Samy Kamkar USES aim bot
Samy wrote aim bots for Counter-Strike cheats.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“Just writing aim bots”
Samy Kamkar USES PunkBuster
Samy treated PunkBuster's anti-cheat software as the target of a cat-and-mouse engineering effort.
Explicit Confidence 95% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I was now playing against these engineers on PunkBuster”
Samy Kamkar MEMBER_OF Fonality
Samy helped start Fonality and later worked there.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“that’s when we started a company called Fonality”
Samy Kamkar USES client-side validation bypass
Samy bypassed MySpace's client-side photo-count validation and submitted additional photos directly to the API server.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“he could bypass this validation and talk directly to the API server”
Samy Kamkar USES cross-site scripting
Samy found a way to execute JavaScript within a CSS tag on MySpace profiles.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I found a way to execute JavaScript within a CSS tag”
NFC credit-card decryption-key attack DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy created a proof-of-concept attack against additional NFC credit cards, including a VISA Chase card.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I just created a proof-of-concept that opened up this to some additional credit cards”
NFC credit-card decryption-key attack AFFECTS NFC
The attack affected NFC credit cards by enabling decryption and access to card information when the decryption key was obtainable.
Explicit Confidence 97% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“you could actually just buy a chip with the decryption key”
Samy Kamkar USES side-channel attack
Samy demonstrated timing and power analysis using acoustic signals from a computer's processor to recover cryptographic keys.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I can do timing and power analysis”
Samy Kamkar USES Arduino
Samy investigated whether a low-cost Arduino could perform side-channel attacks.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“on a two-dollar chip or an Arduino”
Evercookie DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy created the open-source Evercookie JavaScript library.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I created this open-source JavaScript library called Evercookie”
Evercookie USES Flash cookies
Evercookie stores tracking identifiers in Flash cookies as one of multiple local-storage mechanisms.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“you’d store it in Flash cookies”
National Security Agency USES Evercookie
The episode says classified documents indicated that the NSA sometimes used Evercookie to track users through Tor.
Attributed Confidence 94% · Jack Rhysider EP 61 Details
“the NSA sometimes uses Evercookie to track its users through Tor”
Skyjack DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy put his drone-hijacking proof of concept into the open-source Skyjack project.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I put all of this into an open-source project called Skyjack”
Skyjack USES Raspberry Pi
Skyjack runs on a Raspberry Pi with wireless transceivers attached.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I took a Raspberry Pi Linux computer, I put my software on it”
Skyjack USES drone hijacking
Skyjack was designed to hijack nearby wireless drones and control them as a swarm.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“it would then hijack and take over that drone”
National Security Agency ASSOCIATED_WITH Windows zero-days
Samy says the NSA stockpiled Windows vulnerabilities and zero-days; the episode presents this in the context of the NSA leaks.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“They stockpiled Windows vulnerabilities, zero-days that nobody knew about”
Firefox USES Google geolocation API
Samy investigated HTML5 geolocation in a Firefox beta and found that the browser returned his exact location.
Explicit Confidence 95% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I saw this thing about HTML 5 geo-location in a Firefox beta”
Google USES wardriving
Samy concluded that Android phones collect nearby Wi-Fi MAC addresses and signal strengths with GPS data, functioning as wardriving devices for Google.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“every Android phone in existence is a wardriving machine for Google”
Samy Kamkar USES traffic-data spoofing
Samy created a proof of concept that sent fake Android-device traffic data to Google to make a route appear congested.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“all those fake devices, would send up information to Google saying hey, I’m one of these Android devices and I’m moving zero miles per hour”
Openpath DEVELOPED_BY Samy Kamkar
Samy says he started Openpath with friends and helped build its secure access-control business.
Explicit Confidence 99% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“I’ve started a company called Openpath with some friends”
Openpath uses TLS as part of its secure phone-based access-control technology.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“We have things like TLS, we have AES”
Openpath uses AES as part of its secure phone-based access-control technology.
Explicit Confidence 98% · Samy Kamkar EP 61 Details
“We have things like TLS, we have AES”
Works mentioned in the transcript. Distinct from show-note sources.
Model gpt-5.6-luna · prompt 1.5.19 · schema 1.5.19 · 2026-09-13T06:20:27.641631+00:00