DEFCON 17: Stealing Profits from Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spam
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 13 ม.ค. 2011
- Speaker: Grant Jordan WiseCrack Tools
Every time you look at your inbox, there it is... SPAM! Your penis needs enlargement, a horny single girl from Russia "accidentally" emailed you, and a former Nigerian prince knows that you're just the man to safeguard his millions. But in 2007, while still a student at MIT, one particular kind caught my eye: stock spam. Those bizarre stock market "tips" that claim you should buy a particular stock because it's "about to go through the roof!!!!" Like most people, I initially thought nothing of these ridiculous emails. That was until Kyle Vogt (now of Justin.tv) proposed the stupidest idea I had ever heard: "There has to be some way we can make money off these spammers". After trying, and failing, to prove Kyle wrong, the two of us embarked on a 4-month study into the dark depths of stock spam. In this talk, I'll explain how we went from hand-sorting tens of thousands of spam emails to developing a trading strategy able to take a piece of the spammers' profits. And how, in the process, our work produced data that disproved the results of nearly all the existing stock spam research.
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Kudos to him, repeating the questions asked so we can all hear it on youtube. The whole thing was quite understandable and watchable.
That's actually a very good thing to do in general when answering questions after any presentation. Then the rest of the audience can hear it too even if they were behind the question asker, and the presenter can ensure that they heard the question correctly.
But yes kudos to him, a LOT of more amateur presenters don't do this and even some people doing professional presentations.
Indeed, and the conference organisers play a big role in this: repeating the questions before answering them should be in the list of instructions.
Indeed, and I also find that it is great that you are making this remark - you as well as the other two people here who responded are quite right!
Yeah I hate it when you don’t hear the question and the guy just starts answering and you have no clue wtf they’re on about. Annoying af
@@EvenTheDogAgrees0
I can't believe what a compelling story line charts of spam volume can tell.
This is the wolf of wall street in a nutshell. Bump penny stocks that are worthless and sell when the bozos bought enough to drive the price beyond anyone's expectation.
If you buy it as soon as the indicator's are in the green, volume, rsi, ema and then refrain from being greedy, take a 20% profit and get out whilst the price is still rising. Rinse and repeat.
MrTruth111 that's a sound method but greed keeps investors in for that extra hour ,hoping for that peak to climb another 1% instead of selling and that's where the burn happens .
Random Vocab: tea leaves are so passé, as are coffee grounds. Chicken bones and animal entrails is where it's at! ;)
He's a good presenter, he can weave a surprisingly interesting and informative narrative out of seemingly mundane or odd subjectmatter
I didn't expect to watch this whole thing, yet i did. Extremely Interesting
+Jelle Meijer Same, it's very cool.
+Jelle Meijer Same xD
Jelle Meijer
MRBLOBBY127
omg, im watching wrestlemania......i see this and pause the show after cena/bella vs miz/maryse. started the video never expecting to watch it all just skip through til the next match.
I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING.
this is actually more entertaining than wrestlemania. wow.
"Okay, but who is dumb enough to buy a stock because an email tells them to?"
Watching this post-gamestop is kind of funny
But gamestop was not about making money. It was about making others lose more money than you.
I think the difference between "get rich" and " spend money to make the rich lose money" is big enough for this to be entirely different things.
Gamestop was killed intentionally. Not cool. Ideology above loserdom/youdom/yourealoser/regulamaleloser/commonregularmaleLoserL + ratiomove + L + ratio
15:23
"How do you sort graphical spam?"
Well, that's obvious. You just need to use text reco...
Oh, it's 2011.
Ai could do this easily
I don't know, freely available OCR isn't exactly state of the art and with just enough level of image compression even commercially used soft does stupid mistakes. From the screenshots I can tell some emails were messed up by multiple background colors which would spoof the recognition process. The technology is getting there but it's still unreliable.
Andrewik it’s good enough.
I used a bunch of demos on my company's documents (scans) and a bunch of memes (just to stress test it). It's not good enough in either case. It really does stupid mistakes and gets lost once you have multiple background colors.
LOL. Even today OCR isn't good enough. Surprisingly there has not been made very much progress in the OCR in the last 10 years or so regarding reading non standard text. OCR is focussing on reading typical office environment stuff, such as business letters, invoices , magazine articles etc. So basically the focus was to make recognition of normal reading situations better, thus lower mistakes from e.g 3% (thus up to SIXTY errors on one normale letter page - state of around 2011) to 0,3% of today (6 errors).
To create a graphic with text in it which can not be OCRed is *very easy* even with todays (2018) OCR software, sometimes a fancy font and some weird background color are already sufficient.
I really enjoyed this talk. So many of these defcon speakers are just slightly above average ego-toting tech consumers. This guy is actually kind of brilliant, and as an added bonus; knows how to communicate & speak publicly.
was thinking the same, he knows the metodology. of what he wants to convey. professional.
apart from repeating himself unessesarily and using "like" and "you know" so much
@@redwarf8118 bruh that's small price to pay you gotta admit
Is it possible to short a pump'n'dump during the pump phase? Is it wise? (Nevermind, answered at 38 minutes).
@@dowskivisionmagicaloracle8593 let's find out...
jk
...or am I?
Yes. Yes I am.
These have been great topics out of defcon in general. This will sound weird, but when taking short naps I like to turn on a defcon speech and fall asleep. It has made my dreams very vivid to the point I remember so much. My dreams will be about the topic at hand to some extent. I’ll even remember the talking points of the topic when I wake up. I know this will get lost in here, still figured I’d through it out there as something interesting.
haha I do the same thing sometimes
It's amazing how many people comment like this is a stock trading video. Sure, you're all stock trading experts! Stock trading was NOT the point. The point was the analysis of the quantity and quality of stock spam to make some profit given a very basic understanding of stock trading. This was more an intellectual exercise than a "how to make money on penny stocks" video.
USE THIS--> facebook.com/StreetFight-Hero-Unlimited-Gold-Crystals-Cheat-955624864473923/?pidid=b1edba07-3927-476f-bd21-85225ca7ad72 IT IS THE WORKING Street Fight Hero Hack TOOL THAT WORKS! ENJOY! DEFCON 17: Stealing Profits from Spammers or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spam
+salam almeer Huh?
+Roshan Raysardar well this is ironic
+salam almeer how shall i steal your profits
Does it really matter so much that other peoples perception of a video doesn't perfectly align with yours, that you had to make a comment pointing out how everyone else is wrong and only you, the master of the human race, could actually understand the *true* purpose and intent behind the creation of a piece if entertainment? Seriously, guy. Get over yourself.
One hell of a presentation. Loved the speech
At a certain point he starts comparing the strength of the botnets (I paused at 24:33 after hearing him do it a couple of times), but the quick climbers are not more powerful botnets. It just takes a lot less time to send an all-text email than it does to send an email with an image attachment.
Very interesting talk though! Good speaker too.
That’s a very good point. Though interestingly that first successful spammer had a steep slope. I wonder if botnet ‘power’ is even a constraining factor or whether it’s the list size? Put another way I wonder if the smallest botnet can effectively hit the largest list.
Also a good point: it makes little sense to hit the same mailbox repeatedly. Either the recipient is gullible, and doesn't require many emails, or they're not, in which case it's wasted effort.
However, they already account for this in their calculations. The spam emails are collected from their personal inboxes, which get emails from various mailing lists. And mailing lists are a good way to reach a large audience with little effort. So we can expand on your reasoning by stating that the size of the list matters less than the ratio of mailing lists versus individual mailboxes. Aditionally: how many of those email addresses are still active? In other words: list quality over list quantity.
especially in 2006. Back then most people (like my financially average household at the time) still exited the room and grabbed a snack while they waited for an image to load. AOL was still relatively common, and if you weren't using it, you were using hotmail instead.
@@EvenTheDogAgrees reminds me of something James Veitch said. To paraphrase, he commented about how ridiculous the offers in spam usually are, and that surely no-one would take the bait. But upon thinking about it, it's a great way to filter the recipients, given only the most gullible would be replying...
Welcome to /biz/
Very articulate, professional speaker! Tiny details like repeating the question really shows how much he cares / thinks about the presentation.
Very interesting defcon talk, and a very humble speaker - thanks for sharing
I'm impressed. not only by the content but mostly... this is the very first time i ever saw the person on the stage "repeating" the question - that surely wasn't to be heard by any single person in the hall but also most of the time is inaudible for us, the viewers - before answering it. It should be common to do so, but (now i can say: "almost") nobody does it.
This repeating of the question not only assures that everybody gets the question to the answer but further certifies the questioner that the man at the microfon understood the question when he is paraphrasing it instead of just replicating (what he's gonna do, when it was a question mit many words).
This is one of the greatest defcon videos of all time, up there with jackpotting atms
It did come back, not in form of stock spam but corrupt/greedy crypto. All the ICOs, pumping and dumping, scams ect.
_"He's one of the founders of justintv"_
Oh hey. Yeah, that turned out REALLY great.
He predicted those cryptocurrency pump and dumps years beforehand. Amazing.
It's not that he predicted them but examined the step prior to them. Pump and dumps are as old as traded commodities and he looked at it as that type of scam transitioned from a real life one to a digital one.
Francis Lai ☆ yeah, well crypto always was a scam based on one group controlling the source code and sucking in gullibles thru "mining" as a lottery appeal
@@KermitFrazierdotcom So you are saying crypto concept can't work due to that? I don't like how crypto is looking right now but soon it will clean itself up or maybe someone else will rebrand the concept and we will love it and think it the future. And then 10 years later we realize it is actually crypto.
Anyway, it is a basic concept for what would be a necessary part of our future advancement into AI, Quantum computers and Space.
Currently, all I see is a robot made out of scraps but is also hollow or barely has anything inside of it.
HyDragon ☆ Actually, what I'm saying is not really trusting advanced coders not to put in convenient backdoors for themselves, their heirs or assigns.
Pump & Dump is an External Threat.
But, yeah, Block Chain is every bit as important as Open Source & Linux. I don't Program, so I can't read Source, but taking tools and refining them outside a Corporate Environment encourages Innovation. Thank You for Asking!
@@KermitFrazierdotcom you have no idea what you're talking about lol
Interesting! goes to show how much information can be obtained using simple, common sense methods(and a lot of time and effort)
These guys basically predicted short term trading right before all the late night infomercials for stock trading systems took over the morning hours of basic cable. Incredible.
It's nothing new.
This is fascinating.
There is stock spam on certain twitter tags now. I can't imagine too many people not realising it's a pump and dump.
Excellent dissection of a great period in time
Great speaker, great topic / experiment and I love how he repeated the audiences questions so us uboobers could understand!! Legend mate.
Brilliant work. Incidentally a great insight into market psychology. I know it's an old talk but I enjoyed it.
I don't even know what this is yet, but it's about 2 mins in and I'm already stuck. Good job.
Super speaker. I empathized with the feeling of loss at week 7 when your reliable graphical spammer just stopped.
Nice explanations. Great video. Cheers mates!
I was expecting a twist at the end that they were the ones who made the one successful spammer leave the market because they went massively short on the chosen stock at just the right time to make it tank and force the spammer to sell at a loss.
God, I remember watching this back in high school!
great speaker. great forensics. well done, sir.
So good, and I didn't know what the hell Defcon is! I do now, and I'm binging...
I love how you can hear the TF2 talk/presentation in the background
I can't believe I sat here and listened to the entire thing and wasn't bored to sleep I was actually quite stimulated by the talk. I'm doing college work while watching this and I'm not falling asleep it's quite odd. Considering I have zero interest in stocks and the like
Kudos for repeating the questions of the audience.
"No emails while stock is open, Probably these guys are busy trading" - Nope, the botnet computers, common infected home PCs are off, because their (legal) owners/users are at work. Same at night, when they sleep!
Timezones are a thing, I doubt that the victims would all be on the same one, that would be actually very unlikely because it would be extremely inefficient.
Not to mention some leave their computers running 24/7.
One of the problems, is that people pay to subscribe to legitimate Investment newsletters, but those newsletters aren't very picky about who they sell advertising to. So people end up with emails from scammers along with the newsletter they paid for. It's the same problem that certain TV channels have showing scammy infomercials.
A lot of the scammers are using videos now. If it's a video presentation it's a scam. There are technologies that can facilitate sorting. One is sound to text sound recognition which can then be searched and another is optical character recognition of graphics. It's more cpu intensive though.
i cant believe i enjoy this as much as i do.
I don't know how I got here in 2018 but this was very interesting....I wasn't even browsing Tedtalks and this came up. I think I was looking at tabletop games. Very good information.
Excellent. Just wish I had watched way back then :-)
Interesting, he's a good speaker. Like it that he repeats the questions asked because a lot of times it's irritating that you can't hear what the questioners are asking..
Fascinating topic. And it sounds like you did this analysis none too soon.
The thing about a knowledge difference between those that profit and those that lose is that, so very often, it just comes down to research. Really that simple. It doesn't require knowing secrets or anything like that. Just... good, honest research and understanding of how this stuff works.
Precisely...
Its all about in the know evrey year a women who know has ever seen gets taken to a secret room to tell people how many noxes off oranges wer produced this year example if its 200 millon you go bearish you sell if its 50 millon you buy bullish lets say that women got diverted before she enterd ghat room to her mate in the NYSE and she whipserd 50 mill boxes he would then go buy then evreyone else has to wait for the phone call down to trading floor i was doing very well untill something happened in my life now i dont have the 25k to re start i been using a demo account and my 5000 is up to 476,000 pound within 4 months
+Box Box That comment made no sense at all, do you even English bruh?
graph at 5:00 it looks like what happened with BTC. Pumping price to high levels which was followed by sharp drop...
Great talk! Very interesting.
"So you need to go pump and dumb, so I can ride your train" .
That is what I'm hearing from him.
wow! thank you, very much! so January 2007 was The Date! cool..
Hmm, looking forward I guess you would need to look at other media as well as e-mail to work out similer patters, such as forums (mentioned in the video) and all the other common media you see now. - Very good video.
24:00 but isnt it possible that the other dudes dont have super-powerful botnets, but rather that their text-emails are of a much smaller size to send? I mean like byte-per-email. Or is that not a factor?
Great presentation. I learned a new way to promote my new startup business, (no stocks). Thank you.
Question regarding the curves at 23:20. He mentions these were the most powerful botnets they had identified, but they only tracked volume by number of emails sent, not data, right? Pure text emails should be lower data than image-based ones, so presumably these new botnets weren't any stronger than MPRG, but the spammers just made a bad strategic decision in trying to compensate for the use of spam filters by sending mass text emails instead of fewer image-based mails, trying to hit a large number of people with outdated software who didn't have a working spam filter? Maybe they banked on the idea that people with no spam filters would also be more likely to fall for the scam, and thus mass-mailing text could be more effective than bypassing spam filters.
justin tv... Now that's a throwback.
That safe-cracking device looks like a fun project
Great talk learn a lot
Wow, very interesting. Only 2k views? This is some pretty crazy information. Great job and great speach
THIS WAS A GREAT VID!
This is basically what was illustrated in the "Wolf of Wallstreet." The only difference is that the company did not 'own' the stock, and the sales were done through advertisement and through phone call sales.
Is it possible to short a pump'n'dump during the pump phase? Is it wise? (Nevermind, answered at 38 minutes).
Also I love how do you sort graphical spam => by hand.
Nowadays we can sort the stuff pretty easy with all the fancy AI and neural networks. It's crazy how this video is actually dated.
It's crazy how much further neural nets have come even since your comment and now
Watching this in 2018 and yes indeed something similar came back in a different format. The world of BTC and alt coins. It's amazing how it worked so well and many people got suckered and lost their money. Of course there are genuine projects out there but the greedy ones ruined it for everyone else. Now, they rely on telegram groups of thousands of people to call coins to buy in to while dumping, without worrying about spam filter, it was pretty impressive and worked really well.
He is a genius presenter and researcher....
This guy was really interesting. Very cool story
Can't really short it because the stock is not very liquid after the bottom falls out.
you'd be better off buying another pump/dump stock than to wait for liquidity for the initial stock
Excellent project
Consistent patterns go away about as quickly as they are established.
There is someone playing TF2 on the background, you can hear the Domination sounds play very faintly
Nice talk
It is quite outdated as it talks about stock-market-spam and as the speaker himself says, it was mostly gone a few months after the events took place. But it's nevertheless interesting to watch to know how it used to be and hear the thought process of the speaker.
This guy is a very good speaker but most of all he is a genius! Data is the key to everything these days.
Link Dropping on forums , forums were people are already looking for a short sale stock . any High traffic forums 4chan type forums . You need to buy at the start and sell by Monday at 10:15 am , by then most likely is as High as it'll get :\ QC
Wow good technique , it can still be applied on legal stock spam
9:27 Ok, I think I get it !
That's genius !
@35:01
So you just wait for the stock to tank. Then buy it at a low point and wait for the stock to swing back up to it's actual value it had before the manipulations and sell then.
@skidrowsux1977 Yes it does. look at 4:24 you see that after the initial Pump, the dump drops below the original stock value, then recovers above it, drops below it again and then recovers to the original value. Offcourse you can't do it for huge amounts of stock (cause you wouldn't be able to sell that much) but you can make a profit that way imho
thanks to this video I knew the whole wallstreetbets thing was an obvious pump and dump
Good talk, but not a stock trader otherwise he would know about sell stops so that you never have to lose any significant money...
I wonder how much of the spike in trading volume were spam readers and how much were people jumping on the train because of the changes in values.
They still happen, not in emails, but on social media. Channels on Telegram.
I'm in favor of coining "pump and dump" as an infosec term. Classy.
14:26 is that the TF2 domination sound in the background?
Thyt0m yep
Thyt0m
KadenTheEpic 123
Yeah, I cought that too. You can hear it multiple times and sometimes you hear the revenge sound.
Yep; it's from the TF2 talk. ( th-cam.com/video/SooVvF9qO_k/w-d-xo.html )
It's starting to happen again, caught a stock spam in my filter.
There is a spam going around that is the typical pump and dump but this one is pure gold. They found cure for cancer guys!
" .. safe-cracking device .." Ahh, the things we do when we're young ;+}
Of all the stocks he had mentioned or shown by the halfway point, one is still trading. Some had been involved in litigation or SEC actions. The survivor peaked at about $50 briefly circa 2007-8, plummeted and straight-lined until 2014. It hit $1.25, fell, leapt to $0.50 in 2019, fell, and currently attracts half that price at a volume of about 150,000 shares daily. That is QEGY. Quite frankly I think it is poised for another of its historic leaps and at a mere shiny quarter per share, now, and I mean NOW, is the time to jump in with both feet. In 2015 it doubled overnight. It fell again but mustered some strength for that 2019 high point I mentioned above. Back to the floor it went but its climbing like like a toboggan on Disneyland’s original Matterhorn as we speak. Get in, get out, and thank me later! Just kidding. Sort of. seekingalpha.com/symbol/QEGY
And thank you for bring spam back
tldr summary would be nice, I can guess what they'll do
Was there any fighting in the server room?
I read all about a very similar technique in "Anyone can make a million" by Dr. Morton Shulman. (who by the way was a Canadian crime fighting coroner that inspired the TV show Quincy). Rather than emails he suggested buying stock that was being hyped as a winner by the most read stock advisories. They would "burble" in value just like the examples in the video. I guess the moral is nothing is new......
38:04 as for shorting, you cannot short stocks under $10 or $5 a share, the brokers cannot borrow shares of penny stocks. also there are no options on these stocks
It seems to me that this wouldnt have been that hard to catch on to....why didnt many other catch on?
I wonder whether that actually stole any profits from the spammers, or just added to their profits (and to the losses of people buying and selling later)?
Many traders started courses on shorting these. Unfortunately it's so risky you can end up in massive debt and these traders didn't care. They don't teach well and had their own scam going. Get students, cash up, move on and walk over those who died trying.
anyone else hear the TF2 Domination sound in the background? 14:26
14:28 is.... is that the tf2 domination in the background???
Asian markets are definitely experiencing this now
Very good videos
Very interesting. I wish I had the same type of analytical brain as this guy!
P.S. Why not short sell as the stocks take a dive? Making money as they drop. Of course this spamming would have to return.
How many hundreds of hours must they have spent looking through spam? Also how did they attract so much spam?
should cover hotel podium ad with screen
Didn't the whole..."will this come back" and his game thing and all, didn't that die with hyper trading cause THAT little blip is eaten by algorithms?
How did he get data about email frequencies? That would require access to thousands of email inboxes.
Shorting is usually limited to stocks >$5/share.
you can short OTC pennies, just have to have the right broker with market access.