Deep dive into the black market of account making | What world should I watch? I want to watch Lulu

Yesterday, the self-media Sanbiao Longmenzhen published an article titled "Henan girl Lulu taught me a 70,000-yuan lesson", which quickly went viral in WeChat Moments. This seemingly erotic article, which is not so erotic in reality, even alarmed the big boss Ma Huateng, which is also amazing.

To briefly summarize the content of the article "Sanbiao": "Sanbiao", who writes articles on science and technology and the Internet, encountered a "ghost wall". It may be that a certain account-making group purchased a large amount of leaked account information, and found "Sanbiao", a heaven-chosen account with a good number of years and fans, so they sent the editor "Lulu" to take over. After "Lulu" took over "Sanbiao", a platform account that had no income, she drastically deleted all the previous content, changed the name to "Entertainment and Lulu", and started writing articles in a headline-grabbing style for two months, earning more than 70,000 by updating five pictures and texts every day.

Isn’t it magical? After reading this article, the editor excitedly sent it to a colleague and improvised a “Lulu”.

I often seem out of place because I am too good

Ahem, that’s getting off topic.

The black market of account making

What makes all media people gnashing their teeth is the "account-making party". The things they have worked so hard to write appear on other platforms with a different title, and even marked as original. What's more annoying is that the traffic is still good.

The hidden behind this may be the black market of account creation. They often have a formed team, and after smelling the bonus policies of major platforms to support original creation, they seize the business opportunity and form a complete industry chain from buying and selling accounts, recruiting writers, creating popular articles, and opening classes.

To put it bluntly, it is to fleece the educated people.

Leifeng.com (official account: Leifeng.com) has reported articles on similar topics such as "water army", "brushing orders", and "fleecing". Among them, the account-making black industry is an inseparable link in the black industry chain and is an account provider in the black and gray industries.

The entire black and gray industry chain includes the following links:

[Image provided by Digital Alliance]

In addition to real users step by step registering and passing the review to become platform accounts, the means of obtaining accounts by the black market are more diverse:

On the one hand, they register new accounts in batches , obtain mobile phone numbers from card dealers, and illegally purchase identity cards, bank cards and other information. They use cat pools, group control and other tools through code receiving platforms to receive SMS or voice verification codes, and use virtual machine simulators and other software to simulate the real network and equipment environment to register accounts.

Of course, after registering a new account, the black market group will also imitate the real user to perform some operations to increase the weight of the account to facilitate subsequent black market projects.

Another way is to obtain old accounts , which have been registered for a certain period of time and have their own weight, and some even have a certain number of fans and works. Such accounts are considered difficult to be blocked and are popular in the market.

Old numbers and numbers with a certain level of authority are generally obtained in two ways:

Account theft: The main method is phishing. For example, the hacker releases secondary packaged software to add the functions that the user needs. When users use these modified software, the hacker will receive their account names and passwords.

Scanning numbers: One is to use the mobile phone number of the code receiving platform as the user name, and directly change the password if it is already registered. This is a case of stealing others' numbers registered in batches. Another simple and crude method is that hackers use technical means to drag the database, collide the database, illegally obtain a large number of account names, add weak passwords, and verify them one by one. This kind of account is generally a real user. (For example, "Sanbiao" became "Lulu" because of this method)

The number has been retrieved, but where is the information?

Should users of these stolen accounts worry about their information being leaked?

Liu Jingjing, co-founder of the Digital Alliance, told Leifeng.com that these platform media accounts illegally obtained through database dragging and database collision pose a risk of personal information leakage. However, at present, the probability of the account-making group specifically obtaining media accounts in batches is low, which can also be reflected in the manuscripts of "Sanbiao". After Sanbiao's account was stolen, it was only changed to an entertainment marketing account, and no further fraud or other fraudulent acts were carried out against Sanbiao himself and his original fans and family.

Generally, the black industry will roughly classify the user information obtained through database tampering and database collision according to the type, scale and value of the user information. The common types are game accounts, financial accounts, and real information. The lives of victims whose information has been leaked will be affected to varying degrees depending on the type of leaked information.

Generally speaking, if a gaming account is stolen, the corresponding equipment will be sold; if a financial account is stolen, the deposits in the account will be looted, and other information will be sold for a few yuan per piece to illegal merchants who are eager for real information.

Simply put, the biggest role of the account-making group is to have enough accounts and sell them after classifying them according to account attributes, categories, values, etc. Behind this transaction chain, problems such as personal information leakage are also exposed.

Are the relevant companies really indifferent to the various activities of the black market account-making industry?

No, the current crackdown measures taken on the market mainly include:

1) Real-name registration for mobile phone numbers. However, the black market can obtain a large number of mobile phone numbers by impersonating others or through other means, and use them to register secondary accounts;

2) Mobile Internet companies will use big data technology to analyze user behavior and create user profiles. By establishing user blacklists, they can track the activities of high-risk accounts and stop malicious behavior in a timely manner. However, there are also cases of misjudgment and wrong judgment.

Liu Jingjing told Leifeng.com that in the process of fighting against the black and gray industries, small accounts will also be used by normal users in scenarios such as taking taxis and ordering meals. Therefore, there is a contradiction between the risk control measures of such companies for the identification of small accounts and the risk control rules, resulting in the inability to effectively identify such small accounts through risk control platforms and some technologies such as mobile phone number blacklists to prevent the black and gray industries.

3) In the era of mobile Internet, when the account information used to identify users is no longer unique and reliable, related companies and organizations will add the dimension of "device". Starting from the perspective of mobile devices, the uniqueness of the device's trusted ID is used as an important indicator to determine whether the account is truly unique, thereby identifying and restricting the reuse of small accounts. Because the cost of the device is very high compared to the account, restricting it from the perspective of the device will greatly increase the cost of cheating in the black industry.

The proliferation of fake accounts, malicious registration and other black and gray industries breed in the Internet industry and are closely related to a variety of illegal and criminal black and gray industries. Combating and managing them requires the joint efforts of multiple parties. As a mobile Internet company, on the one hand, we need to strengthen the protection and management of user data, and on the other hand, we also need to dynamically improve the company's risk control level as market demand continues to change.

After the news fermented yesterday, Penguin published an "Announcement on Severely Cracking Down on Account Theft and Comprehensive Upgrading of Security Mechanisms". The announcement stated that the platform found that the cause was the leakage of the account and password database of a well-known external website at the end of December 2018. Some criminals recently used the database to leak information and maliciously attacked and cracked the Penguin account, causing some Penguin authors to be unable to log in normally, and the account and related income became abnormal. Penguin said that it would take measures such as cracking down on account theft, enhancing login security, and checking historical data to solve the account abnormality problem.

In addition, Li Hang, general manager of Tencent Group’s marketing and public relations department, said in a post late at night that there is no such thing as “internal anti-corruption is about to begin because of the Lulu incident”. Tencent is preparing to establish and plans to launch the “Penguin Original Expert Committee” in the near future to promote copyright protection.

But Sanbiao was not satisfied with this response. Today, Sanbiao published another article titled "Behind the Lulu incident is the loss of Tencent's assets", arguing that Tencent's response can be summed up as "account hacking and database tampering. The Lulu Group is not owned by Tencent alone. Five articles per hour means high profits. If you don't agree, bite me. Penguin's anti-corruption campaign has become a normal practice. Is it your turn to start it?"

Below is a round of criticism of the recommendation algorithm.

Compared to these serious comments, the comments under "Lulu"'s article are more lively:

Netizen A: Seeing the income of more than 70,000 in 60 days, I was excited!

Netizen B: We earn more than 100 yuan a day, and we go abroad to shoot and edit by ourselves, jump around, find people and friends, collect local materials, and conduct in-depth visits, but this income is not enough to add subtitles. There is no way, this is the recommendation mechanism, this is what most people want to watch. But now, I can't live happily anymore.

Netizen C: The veteran new media operators pretended to be calm: You can learn, but it’s not necessary… (then went to pick up the dusty Penguin account)

Netizen D: Living in a villa for two months? Just tell me whether I can sleep in it (tax) or not?

Netizen E: When Penguin Account becomes a carnival stage for professional account-making teams, those who write seriously will only bring disgrace upon themselves if they go there.

…

Some people also sighed, "Sanbiao, what a miserable man. Lulu is gone, and the remaining money in the account has been frozen. I don't know whether Sanbiao, who took over Lulu's account, will become Niuhulu Lulu or...

The last easter egg, after reading Sanbiao's article, the editor also registered a Penguin account, but today received a message that the review was not passed. The reason turned out to be that the photo of the person did not match the ID card information? (Are girls not allowed to change a lot after growing up?)

Why can't it be accepted without plastic surgery or head replacement? The editor didn't believe it and changed the photo and continued to apply.

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