From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 22:25:22 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
In-Reply-To: <v03020925afbbe739dc7f@[139.167.130.246]>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970605093823.6541K-100000@cybercash.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



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 <rah@shipwright.com>
> To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu
> 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 <declan@well.com>
> To: cypherpunks@toad.com
> Subject: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Sender: owner-cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
> Precedence: bulk
> Reply-To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
> X-Loop: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
> 
> [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.
> 
> [...]
> 
> --- end forwarded text
> 
> 
> 
> -----------------
> Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), 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/
> 
> 
> 
> For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to
> "dcsb-request@ai.mit.edu" with one line of text: "help".
> 

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