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February 17, 2004

more hacking of Friendster

If you want to see a beautiful exponential curve, graph the commonality of last names. Some names (::cough:: Smith) are EXCEPTIONALLY common. Jonathan Moore realized this and he used it to extract more data from Friendster. "From this we see that after trying only twenty-eight last names we have a ten percent chanse of having guessed the user's last name."

Moore continues on to tell us other ways of extracting purportedly private data from Friendster. Ah, hackers, how i love thee.

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Posted by zephoria at February 17, 2004 12:05 AM | TrackBack

Comments (3)

Dan:

Presumably you can shorten the odds further by eliminating unlikely first name/last name combinations. e.g. assume that few Alices are going to have the surname Kumar, and few Smiths are going to have the first name Rohit...

Elle:

hi. if you notice this, do u mind to hack this friendster account which is belonged to me.
first name: simply
last name: beautiful
well the main reason is i forgot my email address and i wanted to close this account... i registered it 4 days ago.. do send me an email back thank you