Declan McCullagh on Wed, 4 Jun 1997 21:30:38 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News |
[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 (thenetlynews@pathfinder.com) 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. [...] --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de