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Re: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
Although you can never completely eliminate it, technological fixes to do
velocity checking, source IP address profiling, etc., seem so obvious I
just don't see how this can be any sort of insurmountable problem...
It should have been obvious from the start that you would have a lot more
people trying to steal service from a porn site than from, say, a Disney
site.
Donald
On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Robert Hettinga wrote:
> Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 23:47:10 -0400
> From: Robert Hettinga <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
>
> --- begin forwarded text
>
> Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 12:01:22 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Sender: [email protected]
> Precedence: bulk
> Reply-To: Declan McCullagh <[email protected]>
> X-Loop: [email protected]
>
> [We include links to sites with porn passwords in today's story, BTW.
> --Declan]
>
> *******
>
> http://cgi.pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1015,00.html
>
> The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/)
> June 4, 1997
>
> Porn Free
> by Chris Stamper and Greg Lindsay ([email protected])
>
> Sexfilms.com used to be a small, members-only adult site
> that shipped full-frame videos over a super-fast T-3 line. Traffic on
> the site was comfortably low for about a year, owner Ray Alba says,
> until one name -- "Joe Camaro" -- started appearing with some
> frequency. Actually, it started appearing 500 times a minute. From
> Sweden, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore -- just about anywhere. Somebody
> was passing out the password.
>
> Download speeds faltered, from 300K/sec to 6K/sec. And then the
> servers themselves began to crash. Finally, Alba had to shut down the
> site for several weeks to clear out Camaro and numerous other accounts
> that had leaked out to the Net. Alba was the latest victim of... Porn
> Piratz!
>
> A huge number of passwords to pay-only porn sites are loose on
> the Net. Just surf newsgroups like alt.sex.passwords or do a simple
> search through a typical web engine and long lists of logins are easy
> to find. Some of these logins are giveaways from people who ponied up
> the low, one-time-only flat fees that many sites charge. Others,
> apparently, were obtained with phony credit card numbers. Who knows
> how Porn Piratz get the rest. But they do: A Hustler executive told us
> that Hustler's sites have seven times its paid membership logging on
> every day.
>
> [...]
>
> --- end forwarded text
>
>
>
> -----------------
> Robert Hettinga ([email protected]), Philodox
> e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
> "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
> [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
> experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
> The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/
>
>
>
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