November 23, 2015 at 21:11Unknown programmer sends SMS alerts to those who posted their phone number on Twitter
Edition TheVerge to communicate with an unknown programmer, which essentially sends SMS-spam on users' phones, but this is guided by noble motives. A citizen is forced to hide his identity, since his actions from the point of view of the law are very doubtful. At the same time, he believes that the frivolity of users who freely publish personal data in the public domain of social networks is a harmful habit and considers it his duty to point to it.
Those Twitter users who were reckless to publish the phone number directly in the tape in the public domain, began to receive SMS messages with “interesting facts” about cats on their phones. True, the message indicated the ability to unsubscribe from the newsletter. To do this, you had to tweet "@Snowden Meow, I <3 catfacts", mentioning the account of Edward Snowden, known for his struggle for the privacy of personal data.
Finding frivolous Twitter users was easy. For this, a noble programmer wrote only two scripts. One of them analyzed the stream of tweets through the official API of the service and extracted phone numbers from them using regular expression. After that, it remains to turn to a free SMS messaging service, which had such a weak CAPTCHA that it was not difficult to deal with its recognition. The choice of topic for “punitive” SMS is also explained quite simply - one of the first tweets of Edward Snowden was dedicated to his love for cats.
It is not known whether the author of the unusual action is connected with Edward Snowden or even is himself, but earlier, a funny situation also happened to the twitter of the former NSA employee. Edward, barely registering on the microblogging service, forgot to turn off email notifications of new replies and retweets. As a result, as Snowden himself wrote later, users were so active that his mailbox was filled with 47 GB of notifications.
don't give out your phone number kids - @Snowden Meow, I <3 catfacts pic.twitter.com/KyqZMGggCm
- ️️️️️️️️️️ (@artaimh) November 18, 2015Those Twitter users who were reckless to publish the phone number directly in the tape in the public domain, began to receive SMS messages with “interesting facts” about cats on their phones. True, the message indicated the ability to unsubscribe from the newsletter. To do this, you had to tweet "@Snowden Meow, I <3 catfacts", mentioning the account of Edward Snowden, known for his struggle for the privacy of personal data.
Finding frivolous Twitter users was easy. For this, a noble programmer wrote only two scripts. One of them analyzed the stream of tweets through the official API of the service and extracted phone numbers from them using regular expression. After that, it remains to turn to a free SMS messaging service, which had such a weak CAPTCHA that it was not difficult to deal with its recognition. The choice of topic for “punitive” SMS is also explained quite simply - one of the first tweets of Edward Snowden was dedicated to his love for cats.
Three cats and you're a cat lady, right? But nobody ever called a guy a cat lord. #catlords
- Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 8, 2015It is not known whether the author of the unusual action is connected with Edward Snowden or even is himself, but earlier, a funny situation also happened to the twitter of the former NSA employee. Edward, barely registering on the microblogging service, forgot to turn off email notifications of new replies and retweets. As a result, as Snowden himself wrote later, users were so active that his mailbox was filled with 47 GB of notifications.