From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 03:34:50 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970604120106.20770H-100000@well.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



[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.

[...]