Monday, July 29, 2013

Facebook Filters

I worked on the 2nd part of a project to try and automate signing up users for Facebook accounts. I can successfully do this when Facebook is playing nice. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't always play nice and asks you to verify that the user signing up is a real person. Facebook also will filter out e-mails that it doesn't like, which just so happen to be the e-mails I want to use because you don't have to sign up for them. I found a couple like YopMail and MailTrash that work. The real issue is that Facebook will randomly (probably not randomly but I haven't seen a good pattern) ask you to verify through a phone call that you are a real person and you can't use the same number for different people. Its possible it tracks accounts being made from the same IP but I tried using Tor for some testing on this and still had problems. My program does work when this doesn't happen and if it was just a CAPTCHA like I've seen happen before than I can just prompt the user to fill it out. I have a few users made now so I can try some things with the 3rd part of the program which is actually the spamming engine. If I come up with a solution I will update this. I will also work on getting up a GitHub to share this project's code.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Generating People

Got a new project I've been working on to try automate the process of making fake Facebook accounts. The first step was to make a bunch of fake people. I got some lists of popular first names from Social Security Administration website and a list of common last names for North America from Wikipedia. Depending on the generated sex it will pick from either a girl's name list or a boy's name list. All birthdays are in the range of 18-80 years of age. The email and passwords are just randomly selected alphanumeric values. I then save each generated person to an XML file. Here's an example of what gets generated:

<person>
<firstname>Michelle</firstname>
<lastname>Green</lastname>
<sex>0</sex>
<birthday>1989-02-25</birthday>
<email>TLOG9THWMKb1lTHX</email>
<password>2sQ2GWn8fnorhG28fEGcEMjxMSEjTEoA</password>
</person>

Some of the next steps for this project include automating the Facebook signup process, which involves using Selenium WebDriver. Then after all the fake people have a Facebook account I am going to try and spam someone with 100 invites or something silly.