Studivz is the german clone of the social network facebook. It is used by millions of german students. Since 2006 there were alot of discussions about privacy issues, data protection, and what could happen if you trust all your private data to a social community. This is the story of two bots who wanted to spread some love and fun in the student community, written in PHP and able to misuse the community's functions.
The Hoebot
The first bot, his name was Hoebot, was looking for great parties and hot girls. He automatically visited and SAVED the profiles of 10.000 students, and left awesome ascii graphics on the public profiles such as "the bitchslap" or "the beertruck". He was also able to "poke" people...
The Lovebot
Since the people really liked Hoebot, we went a little bit further and created "the Lovebot". Lovebot is able to use the personal data, collected by Hoebot, such as: political orientation, single or not single, favourite movies, education and much more.
Lovebot visited the student profiles and left personal hook-up messages to guys and girls, who are apparently single and maybe looking for a new partner. The message was saying: "Hi Martin, Sarah feels so alone. Why don't you visit her profile? This is her profile Number: xxxxxxxxx" Sarah got the same message, addressed the other way around...
In the end both bot accounts were deleted by the admins, and after publishing the documentation of the hack, we had to be really careful because the company investigated us, which lead to a pretty huge media feedback, enriching the discussions about giving away personal data on the internet without thinking about what could happen to it...
Here is the link to the detailed project documentation (in german). studivz_crawler.6x.to
AND FINALLY: Here is the link to the awesome romantic hook-up documentation: Lovebot Hook-up Log
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