Sciencetext Tips & Tricks

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Twitter Porn Names Scam

May 12th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 14 Comments

What’s your #twitterpornname? To find out hook together the name of your first pet + the first part of the street you grew up on. Mine would probably be Bunsen Lynx, which doesn’t sound half bad for a scientwist. That said, raimalarter deflated my ego a little by telling me that name reminded her of The Muppets character. Thankfully Bunsen Lynx is not my genuine porn name, read on to find out why it’s probably not a good idea to reveal your real porn name in public.

It’s not an original idea (Sciencebase ran a post about a similar game in August 2005; and wasn’t the first), it used to be pet and mother’s unmarried name or something similar. It’s almost funny, sometimes. However, it always struck me as a bit of social engineering to get hold of people’s hidden keyphrases that are usually associated with their bank accounts.

Indeed, now that the phrase “twitter porn names” is doing the rounds I mentioned this on Twitter and several people agreed with me. After all, what are the secret questions that most logins ask you to store? Name of first pet, Street address, mother’s maiden name. You see where I’m coming from?

wav4rm certainly agreed that it could be a scam, and suggested that even if it weren’t devised as one, it could still be easily used as one after the fact. It’s a convoluted scam, but anyone looking for ways other than bruteforce password cracking will use any social engineering tricks at their disposal to find weak points in your online security.

So, if you told the whole twitterverse the name of your first pet, and where you were born using twitterpornnames, now is the time to amend your login details, choose a tougher password, and switch to the name of your second pet as your security question instead.

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14 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 12:58 am

    Twitter Porn Names Scam: What’s your #twitterpornname? To find out hook together the name of your first pe.. http://tr.im/l6FI

  • USelaine // May 12, 2009 at 1:09 am

    RT @sciencebase: Twitter Porn Names Scam: What’s your #twitterpornname? … hook together the name of your first pe.. http://tr.im/l6FI

  • Scams Exposed // May 12, 2009 at 1:14 am

    RT @ScamsExposed Twitter Porn Names Scam: Sciencetext – Blogging tips, browsing tricks and compu.. http://twurl.nl/h37wen

  • Mila // May 12, 2009 at 1:17 am

    Twitter Porn Names Scam:What’s ur #twitterpornname? http://tr.im/l6FI RT @sciencebase (take care!)

  • Jo Brodie // May 12, 2009 at 3:11 am

    Reading about the potential for scamming with #TwitterPornNames (answers to some security questions!) via @sciencebase http://bit.ly/VOdwN

  • raluca popa // May 12, 2009 at 4:05 am

    ##TwitterPornName super tare leapsa, tre sa pui numele strazii pe care ai copilarit si al animalului de companie http://twurl.nl/teubkr

  • Robin // May 12, 2009 at 8:40 am

    I think this is a bit of a stretch. Almost no street names are unusual enough to provide any information about where a person was born. (Even given the big assumption that the street would be in the person’s birthplace.) Without city and state information it would be virtually impossible to find what street the person was referring to.

    When you add to that the fact that you don’t have the street number or date information I don’t see anyone could make any use of the information.

    I can see how something like this might be used to lure someone into revealing something useful face to face, if you already know their basic information: name, current address, current phone number, age. But I don’t see how a pornname could “easily” be used for a scam. Even if the person’s twitter ID is their real name and their bio tells what city they live in now, you’re very far away from getting into the person’s account in an unknown bank.

    Are there any examples of anyone actually using information gained from a pornname to pull off a scam?

    Here’s the name of a real street that I really lived on as a kid: South 4th Avenue. Where was I living?

  • Yuri Alkin // May 12, 2009 at 9:25 am

    Great catch. Behavior-based security attacks have been tried before on Facebook and other places, but Twitter makes it way easier, when it comes to scale, reach and data mining. I think like any other scam-like Twitter activity this is only a preview for thisngs to come.

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 8:32 am

    Scamming twitter – didn’t I say all this about 8 hours ago? http://bit.ly/rMpAA

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 11:21 am

    Yuri, I suspect this was initially done for fun, but now that I’ve mentioned it could be a scam, someone will start datamining those tweets you can bet…

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 11:30 am

    @Robin You’re right. Although I bet I could dig around and find out where you actually lived if I really wanted to. But, any tiny nugget of information can and will be useful to a scammer. They could focus on batches of ten tweeps say, visit their websites sites, their facebook pages, their flickr accounts…etc etc and find all kinds of details and minutiae that might ultimately give them have enough information to open a simple account on a website, get a spoofed email address or something and then work their way up to opening a full identity theft and empty your bank account…ever read Red Paperclip?

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    Seems like PCworld and Mashable have finally caught on and published their own take on this “scam”. Like Robin said, it’s a useless scam really, although it could have potential. I suspect it’s just a twitter game that went viral, no one will actually benefit from it other than twitter who will be able to show another big spike in interest when they talk to future advertisers and investors.

  • Kim Woodbridge // May 12, 2009 at 7:54 pm

    Hmm … my first pet was named Mr. Big Stuff and we didn’t have a street name. It was so rural that it was an RFD address – rural free delivery. Mr Big Stuff definitely doesn’t work for a woman. ;-)

    Since so many women keep their own names now, won’t mother’s maiden name become useless?

  • David Bradley // May 12, 2009 at 8:48 pm

    Mr RFD Big Stuff sounds great for a bloke though!

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