Anyone else getting friend requests from people with near-porn as their profile pics?

Back in 2018 (or thereabouts, if I recall correctly), MFP unfortunately experienced a system breach in which some passwords were compromised. We were all asked to change our passwords. Not everyone did so, I'd bet.

I'm speculating, but to me, parts of this look like a scripted (automated) attack on some of those accounts. It's not unusual for these things to take a while to play out. It's also not unusual to structure early attempts to probe how system admins and other users respond to the attempts. Noticing the porn-y photos and disabling accounts is a response.

In terms of how this could be monetized, that may also take a while. Some potential exploits require one-on-one human effort, rather than automated mass actions. The Cyrillic alphabet porn links may lead a few randy people to visit the sites, generating advertising revenue or leading them to pay for premium services, or perhaps downloading malware onto those folks' computers as they navigate the sites.

Beyond the immediate, further exploitation could take a while, since some common exploits aren't readily scripted, but rather require one-on-one interaction using the compromised accounts. For example, there are financial scams (think Nigerian Prince nonsense, possibly subtler), romance scams, etc.: Cat-phishing, future advertising/sales pitches, opinion influencing, flogging outside websites via timeline status updates or PMs here, etc.

As background, there are marketplaces for things like exposed passwords, compromised accounts (i.e., accurate, current, working PW and ID), scripts/tools for nefarious purposes, etc. Some bad actors specialize in part of the process, sell on the result of what they do to others who specialize differently.

This may lead one to ask why compromised passwords that were not changed would not have caused those risky accounts to be disabled or deleted before now. IME, that's the sort of thing that management tends to keep pushing lower on developers' priority lists when it competes for time with new features that can create more business for the organization. (That's not necessarily managers being idiots, IMO, either: It's a natural outcome of the contingencies in a profit-seeking organization.)

I do wonder if the timing of this is somewhat intentional, happening when support staff here are possibly doing work to convert backoffice functions because of the new ownership, things that would be invisible to us as users, but that would distract the developers and system administrators from noticing or responding as quickly as they might in a period with less upheaval.

Please note: I have no inside info here. The above is pure speculation by an MFP user, though based on having some professional experience with related matters.

JustaJoe00 wrote: »

yeah really seems like someone hacked into the mfp site or something. i think most people that log on here daily have gotten at least a couple of these.

No. I'm starting to feel a little left out.