Link Spam

WHID 2009-38: Time's Poll For Most Influencial Hacked

Updated: 
19 April 2009

Polls are easy target for automation abuse. You can usually participate anonymously and the poll operator has an interest in drawing as many participants as possible, but as demonstrated by previous incidents such loose security enables hackers to distort the results.

This time a hacker succeeded in manipulating Time's poll for most influential people in 2009.

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WHID 2009-32: 750 Twitter Accounts Hacked

Tagged:  
Updated: 
10 March 2009

Twitter reports in a blog entry that 750 accounts were hacked. The hacker posted messages linking to a porn webcam. While Twitter did not disclose how the attack was carried out, the suggested remediation hints that the account passwords were guessed, probably using a brute force attack.

WHID 2008-57: Craigslist's Battle Against Spammers

Updated: 
2 February 2009

Insufficient Anti-Automation is fat becoming the #1 threat to web sites. Since Captcha has been proved practically useless, especially when there is a financial gain from automating access to the site, sites are pretty much defenceless against harmful automation. Techdirt's story about Craigslist losing the battle against automation tool is a very good example of this serious problem.

Read the comments, they are enlightening. As usual, one of the problem when spam is involved is defining if and what is a wrong doing and what is a  valid action. Some commenters say that Craigslist has become useless due to the spam, while others say that Craiglist is the worst censors on the Internet not letting small time businesses work. Other argue about whether this is a crime or not. 132 comments, and they keep coming 8 months after the article has been published.

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