- Jun 16, 2014
- 781
For those of you who regularly read my ramblings you'll probably know I'm quite a fan of the power of Google, I keep a copy of their cheat sheet under my mattress 
Anyway I got bored today and decided to do some data mining, see how much I could find out about an individual based on their browsing habits, as we all know this is gold dust for advertising networks who can then target the ads that you're most likely to click. For example, with some basic data mining techniques we can find out whether a user likes to watch lots of free movies online (with illegal streaming) and if so, we can target him with a free movie & codec adverts.
Obviously it goes a lot deeper than that but I thought I'd share a case study or two just to show you how easy it is to uncover a incredible amount of information about people with just a single search.
And on a side note, for any of you interested but in the dark, there was a an incident a few years ago in which AOL 'released' a ton of anonymous data, showing what an individual anonymous user had searched for. You can find the original dumps pretty easily with, yep, you guessed it... Google
Anyway on to the main heart of the thread, the search query I use to dig up data on a particular user is as follows: site:www.mywot.com intext:"N********r" intitle:Reputation
If you want to mine forum posts as well just remove the last part (intitle). Anyway, this particular user I searched for, his username censored so he doesn't come trying to sue me, let's have a look at what I can find out about him...
I find he makes a comment on a porn site, rating it as positive and one of the best he's seen. There are plenty more too revealing, shall we say an 'interesting' taste in adult entertainment, including three sites which he rates positively which appears to promote child pornography. One appears to be blocked already, I reported the other two.
So a potential pedo, let's see what else we can find. Among his other ratings are the homepage of the US Marines, and as above, yet more porn sites with a sole preference for 'straight and lesbian' porn, all this suggesting that he's male (educated guess).
He also curiously rates the site for a university in Houston, Texas, so now we've even got his state. Digging right back through his ratings after about 19 pages we hit gold. His very first rating is an advertisement for his blogspot page in which he happens to state his full name "James Jackson Jr" (I've put a false name here). Sadly the link isn't working but we've got his name, state and some other basic info. Potentially enough to track him in real life if we wanted, and more than enough for a piece of adware to target ads with great accuracy (and targeted ads are of course, worth more money)
Consider this guy reported to the authorities, and think twice when you post a rating on WOT, you may just be revealing more about yourself than you realise
Ps. Sorry for the lack of real names, I'm a little nervous about getting MalwareTips into trouble, but feel free to try this out for yourself and see if you can dig up anyone interesting
Update: Bing Version: site:www.mywot.com intitle:Reputation "user"+
site:www.mywot.com intitle:Reputation "user" "malware"+
Anyway I got bored today and decided to do some data mining, see how much I could find out about an individual based on their browsing habits, as we all know this is gold dust for advertising networks who can then target the ads that you're most likely to click. For example, with some basic data mining techniques we can find out whether a user likes to watch lots of free movies online (with illegal streaming) and if so, we can target him with a free movie & codec adverts.
Obviously it goes a lot deeper than that but I thought I'd share a case study or two just to show you how easy it is to uncover a incredible amount of information about people with just a single search.
And on a side note, for any of you interested but in the dark, there was a an incident a few years ago in which AOL 'released' a ton of anonymous data, showing what an individual anonymous user had searched for. You can find the original dumps pretty easily with, yep, you guessed it... Google
Anyway on to the main heart of the thread, the search query I use to dig up data on a particular user is as follows: site:www.mywot.com intext:"N********r" intitle:Reputation
If you want to mine forum posts as well just remove the last part (intitle). Anyway, this particular user I searched for, his username censored so he doesn't come trying to sue me, let's have a look at what I can find out about him...
I find he makes a comment on a porn site, rating it as positive and one of the best he's seen. There are plenty more too revealing, shall we say an 'interesting' taste in adult entertainment, including three sites which he rates positively which appears to promote child pornography. One appears to be blocked already, I reported the other two.
So a potential pedo, let's see what else we can find. Among his other ratings are the homepage of the US Marines, and as above, yet more porn sites with a sole preference for 'straight and lesbian' porn, all this suggesting that he's male (educated guess).
He also curiously rates the site for a university in Houston, Texas, so now we've even got his state. Digging right back through his ratings after about 19 pages we hit gold. His very first rating is an advertisement for his blogspot page in which he happens to state his full name "James Jackson Jr" (I've put a false name here). Sadly the link isn't working but we've got his name, state and some other basic info. Potentially enough to track him in real life if we wanted, and more than enough for a piece of adware to target ads with great accuracy (and targeted ads are of course, worth more money)
Consider this guy reported to the authorities, and think twice when you post a rating on WOT, you may just be revealing more about yourself than you realise
Ps. Sorry for the lack of real names, I'm a little nervous about getting MalwareTips into trouble, but feel free to try this out for yourself and see if you can dig up anyone interesting
Update: Bing Version: site:www.mywot.com intitle:Reputation "user"+
site:www.mywot.com intitle:Reputation "user" "malware"+
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