Gmail Spam Folder Fail

As far as I can remember this is the first email I've had slip past Gmail's spam filters. I got a good laugh out of this when I woke up this morning. My first Nigerian cry for help with promise of fortune.

Just thought I'd throw it up for all to enjoy since I got a good laugh out of it.

from asiya bare
reply-to asiya.bare@gmail.com
to
date Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 10:46 AM
subject Dearest,


Dearest,
My dear I am writing this mail with tears and sadness and pains. I know it will come to you as a suprise since we haven't known or come across each other before, but kindly bear with me at this moment. I have a special reason why I decided to contact you. My situation at hand is miserable but I trust in God and hope you will be of my help. My name is Asiya Ibrahim Bare 25years old girl and I held from Republic of Niger the daughter of Late General Ibrahim Bare Ma?nassara the former President of the Republic of Niger who was ambushed and killed by dissident soldiers at the military airport in the capital, Niamey with his driver and a former Prefect. You can see more detail about my late father here http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/9/newsid_2463000/2463927.stm

I am constrained to contact you because of the maltreatment which I am receiving from my step mother. She planned to take away all my late father's treasury and properties from me since the unexpected death of my beloved Father. Meanwhile I wanted to travel to Europe, but she hide away my international passport and other valuable documents. Luckily she did not discover where I kept my father's File which contained important documents. I am presently staying in the Mission camp in Burkina Faso.

I am seeking for longterm relationship and investment assistance. My father of blessed memory deposited the sum of US$11.7 Million in one bank in Burkina Faso with my name as the next of kin. I had contacted the Bank to clear the deposit but the Branch Manager told me that being a refugee, my status according to the local law does not authorize me to carry out the operation. However, he advised me to provide a trustee who will stand on my behalf. I had wanted to inform my stepmother about this deposit but I am affraid that she will not offer me anything after the release of the money. Therefore, I decide to seek for your help in transferring the money into your bank account while I will relocate to your country and settle down with you. I have my fathers death certificate and the account number which I will give you as soon as you indicated your interest to help me.

It is my intention to compensate you with 20% of the total money for your assitance and the balance shall be my investment in any profitable venture which you will recommend to me as have no any idea about foreign investment. Please all communications should be through this email address only for confidential purposes.

Thanking you alot in anticipation of your quick response. I will send you my photos in my next email.
Yours Sincerely
Asiya Ibrahim Bare

Poor Mr. Ma?nassara

Cyber Cobra Command

My latest post over at Liquidmatrix Security Digest:

Just really couldn't avoid doing a write-up on this story for LSD. This one goes out to anybody who got one of our glorious shwag pieces illustrating our favorite word here at the digest, CYBERDOUCHERY.

I know what the reaction from my fellow liquidmatrix folk will be on this but I hope the rest of you can at least keeps your heads from exploding.

The all powerful and knowing Wall Street Journal announced today that the Obama administration is putting together a "new military command to coordinate the defense of Pentagon computer networks and improve U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberwarfare." Before I continue let me state that I am not trying to be a sarcastic punk and don't think it is a bad idea for the U.S. government to catch up on technology in a security sense. How I feel about the media is a different story.

Anyway, the article goes on to state that this "new military command" is the result of the proverbial straw on the camel from earlier this week when the (again all powerful and knowing) Wall Street Journal published the story amply titled "Computer Spies Breach Figher-Jet Project". Which, in my opinion, based on the title would warrant some government action. However, watch some awesome back peddling:

The move comes amid growing evidence that sophisticated cyberspies are attacking the U.S. electric grid and key defense programs. A page-one story in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that hackers breached the Pentagon's biggest weapons program, the $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter, and stole data. Lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wrote to the defense secretary Tuesday requesting a briefing on the matter.

Lockheed Martin Corp., the project's lead contractor, said in a statement Tuesday that it believed the article "was incorrect in its representation of successful cyber attacks" on the F-35 program. "To our knowledge, there has never been any classified information breach," the statement said. The Journal story didn't say the stolen information was classified.

Well that is just impressive work that demonstrates media experience beyond my years.

But wait! I smell a new cyber buzzword!

A draft of the White House review steps gingerly around the question of how to improve computer security in the private sector, especially key infrastructure such as telecommunications and the electricity grid. The document stresses the importance of working with the private sector and civil-liberties groups to craft a solution, but doesn't call for a specific government role, according to a person familiar with the draft.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates plans to announce the creation of a new military "cyber command" after the rollout of the White House review, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

The article goes on to use my new favorite buzzword cyber command some more in detail. Read on if you dare.

Amazonaphobia

My latest post over at Liquidmatrix Security Digest:


It seems that Amazon has had some interesting going ons recently, and by interesting I of course mean interesting.

I started to write this article last night but the Easter dinner/dessert food coma won the battle and I'm glad it did. As it turns out what was going to be an article solely about censorship in a major online community as transformed into a perfect security article overnight :).

I suppose a brief recap is in order. Long story short this past Friday some homosexual themed romance novels started disappearing from the site's sale's rankings. Amazon first claimed that they were "excluding adult material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists." Well it just so turns out that these lists and searches are generated using user sale's ranks.

Step two in this story is of course a Twitter explosion of hash-tag anger which is self explanatory #amazonfail. Step three? You guessed it, an announcement from Amazon PR that claimed a glitch in the system. First I've heard of a homophobic glitch but I entertained the idea as plausible.

Well that's where the news stopped on my radar last night until a very interesting turn of events this morning. A hacker known as Weev stepped forward claiming responsibility for the #amazonfail stating an exploitation of an Amazon product rating vulnerability. Apparently after a product is flagged as inappropriate enough times it is stripped from the sales rankings lists auto-magically. With some help from some Nigerian friends who registered Amazon accounts and flagged books for him, Weev systematically picked off whichever books he pleased. (Whats with hackers stepping forward lately??)

In case your interested here is the hacker's "confession" that he posted on his LiveJournal:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Not sure if this is actually true but it certainly is interesting.

UPDATE: Some conflicting responses.. Amazon has come up with some stats to back the before-mentioned glitch.
Here's a statement from Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.