Angry in the Great White North

A Toronto-based firm is being sued by Facebook.  The social network giant is alleging repeated attempts by this online porn firm to hack into Facebook's network:

A Canadian company specializing in Internet porn is being sued by Facebook amid allegations it hacked the popular social networking website's computers and tried to access the personal information of users, court documents show.

A numbered Ontario company, which does business online under the name SlickCash, along with several people in the Toronto area, are named in an amended complaint filed by Facebook in San Jose, Calif.

The hugely popular information sharing website alleges that, for two weeks last June, the defendants attempted to access Facebook's servers at least 200,000 times.

"Each of these requests sought to direct Facebook's computers to send information on other Facebook users back to (the company's Internet Protocol) address," the court documents say.

"These requests for information from Facebook generated error messages and were detected as unauthorized attempts to access and harvest proprietary information."

I've been poking into SlickCash, and as advertised, it is associated with a vast number of porn sites.  By stepping backwards through addresses and phone numbers, it would seem that the folks running this operation do it via a number of holding companies:

• Istra Holdings Inc
• Turvill Consultants
• Baltic Consultants
• Butterfly Holdings
• Spiderentertainment 

Rightly or wrongly, these operations are often connected with spam complaints:

An affiliate of slickcash.com is promoting a website through a special kind of botnetwork controlled by sham.zerotollerance.biz on IP 72.36.136.118 .

The spam advertizes (among others) domain jywududale.com . This page redirects to cumshotblast.com of slickcash.com

In the action initiated by Facebook, Brian Fabian, who is associated with all these holding companies, is alleged to be one of the people trying to get access to those thousands of names.

I wonder if this is evolution at work.  If Fabian and his people did try to crack Facebook to get at the names and email addresses of the users, it would be a step up from this message left at a blog post commenting on Al Qaeda's suggestion that Americans convert to Islam.

The Al Qaeda post went up in November of 2003.  Then over a year later, on December 21, 2003, this sole comment appears:

I need more information on the goings on in the middle east… Please sned [sic] all information to :

Butterfly Holdings
265 Port Union #15525
scarborough, Ontario M1C 4Z7
CANADA

or

Phone

416-536-6020
Fax:416-536-4585

Comment by Brian — 12/21/2003

Brian got a favourable response:

Brian, I sent you out our standard packet of Middle East information.

Please be aware that I sent it UPS, which means you probably shouldn’t leave the house until it arrives or they’ll hold it in the Montreal office for 16 hours then return it to JesusHQ.

Comment by Andres — 12/22/2003

Judging by the sorts of sites associated with these holding companies (and yes, I checked around), Fabian doesn't strike me as being too concerned about the Middle East.  I could be wrong, of course, but then maybe this was a standard technique for mining for new email addresses.  I'm interested in [name an issue].  Send me everything you have.

Or maybe he felt pornography was the key to the problems in that part of the world.