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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3 thoughts on “more hacking of Friendster

  1. 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…

  2. 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

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