After MySpace combatted the techniques and implemented new security features, it was time to take what I learned and use it elsewhere. I don’t recall the exact time period that I launch my campaign, but I believe it was sometime late 2007. The site was not particularly large, but it was fresh and the users were extremely active.
My goal was to send a message to every user on the website. To achieve this, I first had to get the user ID string of each user. This was a fairly straightforward task, all I had to do was scrape the member directory. Now I needed accounts to send messages from. I discovered a trick to bypass account activation, meaning the link that they send you in the email to activate your account wasn’t necessary. All you had to do was sign up with an AOL e-mail address. I believe they were having problems delivering email to AOL so they disabled activation for these type of accounts. This would enable me to create a massive amount of accounts using fake AOL email addresses.
I found a programmer that agreed to create the software I needed for a revenue split. It took a couple days for him to complete the software, but only took an hour to spam every member on the website. At the time I was promoting a raunchy cam site, which probably wasn’t the best choice for a classmates/college website, but I knew the guy who owned the website and he was paying $40 per sign up. This wasn’t the most exciting operation, but it gave me experience in dealing with other websites and ideas on how to collect data from a website.
MilliSec 