Daily Express social network pwned by slew of smut The Daily Express MyExpress web service has been swamped by masses of sex spam text in a mighty pwn which may have begun two years ago. Reader profiles on the site have been turned into handy catalogues of naughty practices, seemingly by Eastern European hackers and to no obvious end. The reams of text have the appearance of …
Proverka means "check" or "verification" and not only in verification to computing. It is the general meaning of the word.
By the way, while most of Eastern Europe is indeed from the slavic branch of the indo-european language group, some are not. Hungarians definitely are not.
No need to go to the online bit, a quick flick through to the Sexpress' TV guide in the old-fashioned, dead tree edition will point you at enough smut from Richard 'Dirty' Desmond's pr0n empire to keep you busy for a while.
But they asterisk out the vowels in the naughty words there, so that makes it all nice and above board.....
...being of Eastern European descent myself.
No: there is no such “language” as Eastern European – but there is the slavic group of languages, in which many many words appear in similar form across several different languages.
There’s enough similarity for me to be able to work out the content of a Polish conversation from my knowledge of Russian – and vice-versa. I don’t know the exact etymollgy of “proverka”: I’ve encountered it in a russian context…but it’s the sort of word that almost certainly crosses over. So, not knowing the actual language of origin, I was playing safe: if anyone knows it is DEFINITELY linked to one country rather than another, would be interested to know that.
jane
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I feel sympathy for the Express admins although I think they are lacking due diligence to let it happen for so long.
I run a forum and I swear 98% of applicants are spam bots. Yes I have recaptcha enabled, yes I use anti spam tools to identify & mark known spammers, yes I require applicants to wait for approval. It's still hugely bloody annoying and takes a lot of administration and slows down the legit registrants who have to wait a week until I'm sure they're not bots. No bot has gotten through so far (touch wood) but it's inevitable one will. It is a huge waste of my time to police.
I think the issue is there is no herd immunity. Every site is like every other site with predictable links, predictable fields, predictable captcha mechanisms. If every site was unique in some way they would be hugely more resistant to attack.
A site could randomize the url used for registration, and check the referrer link, or embed some hidden field which is unique to the site or require the user answer a question or click on box (which was generated through JS) etc. Registration would fail (silently if it was not a user error) if the conditions were not met.
Then the attacker would personally have to visit every site they wish to compromise to figure out why the attack didn't work which would slow them down enormously.
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