How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love
A mathematician uses data mining and algorithms to find the perfect match on a dating site:
When the last question was answered and ranked, he ran a search on OkCupid for women in Los Angeles sorted by match percentage. At the top: a page of women matched at 99 percent. He scrolled down … and down … and down. Ten thousand women scrolled by, from all over Los Angeles, and he was still in the 90s.
He needed one more step to get noticed. OkCupid members are notified when someone views their pages, so he wrote a new program to visit the pages of his top-rated matches, cycling by age: a thousand 41-year-old women on Monday, another thousand 40-year-old women on Tuesday, looping back through when he reached 27-year-olds two weeks later. Women reciprocated by visiting his profiles, some 400 a day. And messages began to roll in.
The Secret Service Agent Who Collared Cybercrooks by Selling Them Fake IDs
Secret Service agent Mike Adams used the identity of a grifter named Justin Todd Moss to sell criminals fake IDs and build a case against them. The story behind the Secret Service’s long con:
“From the Secret Service’s standpoint, selling fake IDs – ‘novelties,’ in the parlance of the underground – would have held a number of advantages. Unlike intangible commodities like credit card numbers or passwords, fake IDs must be shipped physically, which gives the agency an address to check out for every customer. And, being photo IDs, the customer had to provide their photos. It’s a rare law enforcement operation that lets the cops collect mug shots before they’ve made a single arrest.
“‘It’s a great idea,’ says E. J. Hilbert, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked undercover in the Carder Planet days. Feds routinely get close to carders by selling ‘stolen’ credit card numbers that are actually provided by card issuers, then tracked. Shipping counterfeit driver’s licenses, he says, has the same advantages.
“‘In fact, it’s even better,’ says Hilbert, now a managing director at Kroll Cyber. ‘You have one name and one ID that you can put in the system and flag. … I tried to get approval for this myself, and they wouldn’t do it.'”
