One of my latest projects has been an automatic Yahoo! account signup program. Yes there are at least 10,000 similar programs out on the net but as with many such Yahoo! programs, I have tried 150 of them and only 1 works halfway. Thus I am forced as with almost all of my Yahoo! programs to create my own. So far I speculate that I am 75% complete at the basic functionality and should be done in a week or so.
The scope of this project is to create a program that will greatly reduce the time needed to create a Yahoo! account. The program will save any relevant predefined personal information that is need across multiple accounts. The user will only be prompted for a username, password, and security image verification. The program will also make every effort to disguise itself as an ordinary browser at the packet level. Planned extensions of this project will be to make a defined iteration count for a particular username (i.e. user1, user2, user3…) so that the user will only have to answer the security question.
Now for the very distant future. Many of you have been around since the time before Yahoo! created their security image and you could make as many bots as you wanted. Of course this was the main reason for the security question. I am sure that most of you have also considered a way of automatically brute forcing the security image, if you haven’t then you are a moron. The underlying technology used by Yahoo! is call Gimpy and is a research project sponsored by the CAPTCHA Project at Carnegie Mellon University [http://www.captcha.net/ ]. There are several version of this technology and Gimpy is one of the least secure. It is openly disclosed on the CAPTCHA site that several researchers have already broken Gimpy. Greg Mori and Jitendra Malik [http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/ ] can currently break Gimpy with a success rate of 92%. Not too bad considering a success rate of only 5% could possibly create 100’s of bots an hour. Unfortunately this site does not provide any source. I know the source has to be out on the web somewhere. Once again if you have any information please let me know. It would only take a matter of days to make a great bot maker just like the good ole’ days.
Lastly, this is the first project that I have used the new Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express [http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/default.aspx ] version with. I have the developer’s version of 2003 so I never thought the upgrade was necessary, I was wrong. The IDE is far superior, new auto code correct functions, better help, and new .NET 2.0 APIs. If you haven’t tried it, get it now. It’s even free.
