On Wednesday 05 April 2006 07:39 am, Dylan Hardison wrote:
> On 4/5/06, Paul M Foster <paulf@quillandmouse.com> wrote:
> > I'm wondering if it is possible to automate this type of thing, as
> > opposed to someone sitting and typing it. And if so, what could they
> > hope to gain?
>
> I it trivially easy to automate something like that. That script I
> recently wrote for Sick Twist, could just as easily submit POST data
> to a form.
>
There are places in this world which have high speed internet connections
where $US 1.00 is a lot of money.
Most such places have a very high unemployment rate which is understandable as
after all the wealth of a country is directly connected to the products
produces which are exchanged in foreign trade. If no products for foreign
trade are produced then the $US tends to be very high priced, local currency
cheap, and high unemployment as nothing is being done to limited
unemployment.
Thinking along these lines it is easy to see that given moderate computer
skills and unlimited manpower the old monkey and typewriter effect of the
given enough monkeys banging randomly on enough typewriters that in time any
know and a large number of dramatic unknown works of literature could be
produced.
It is not inconceviable that there are people in this world that have decided
that it is profitable for then to fill out forms manually with out or with
limited scripts such that potential traffic is directed to a site geared
toward phishing.
No one every said phishing is easy.
The potential of making $US500.00 to $US1000.00 when converted into local
currency many times has the same buying power as $US1,000,000 to someone
living in the US.
I do not know how they do this in all or the details but there are people on
this list who were directly involved with it but Slash Dot has solved this
very issue by requirements of insertion of a code word that changes which one
gets from reading a word placed on the screen in a format that changes on a
random bases.
This may be a solution to the issue of limiting machine generated code
inserting unknown items into the forms.
As far as the other issue noted above manually insertion one would tend to
suspect that the majority of such people assume that all web sites are MS
Windows as that is what they know and are thus easily cracked. With MS
windows being used by a high majority of small websites this would not be an
unreasonable assumption.
At this point some are going to say stop this is a Linux site. It plainly says
so.
Not so fast. There are a large number of computer types who have no idea Linux
exist, a large number that thin Linux is a program that runs under MS
Windows, and an even larger number that believe that MS Windows programs can
be ran directly under Linux by using exactly the same program installation
procedures without an emulator like Wine that one would use to install said
program on a Windows box.
Idiots can be unbelievably stupid. So con people with very limited knowledge
who believe they know it all. If this is what you have then how you combat
this level of mentality is an issue people with more profound than I have
pondered.
SOTL
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