How a Man Got Hired by Facebook by Infecting It with a 'MySpace Worm'

With jobs being hard to come by these days, you need to get creative in order to land that dream gig. We wouldn't recommend this path to everybody, but Chris Putnam earned a job at Facebook by creating a worm that made users' profiles look like a MySpace page.

In 2005, Putnam, along with his friends Marcel Laverdet and Kyle Stoneman, wrote the XSS-based worm, which spread every time an infected Facebook user viewed a friend's profile. In addition to slapping MySpace's clunky boxes and color schemes on top of a Facebook profile's cleaner layout, the worm also sent a friend request to Putnam's account so he could track how far it spread. By doing so, Putnam knew it'd be easy to figure out that he was behind the hack. Sure enough, in less than one day, Putnam received complaints and messages from people -- even some Facebook employees, including co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. He messaged Putnam, saying that the worm was funny, but it was also deleting some users' contact information, which is no joke to the folks at Facebook