redtk - the reddit account toolkit automates reddit account creation

so I had some credits left on decaptcher.com (don't ask) and wondered what the current state of captcha protection is and how easy it would be to spam some popular services. I chose reddit.com for this experiment. (don't worry - no spam was done)

this here is the result of my evil deeds. it's a bunch of scripts and code that will automate reddit account creation.

at first I tried to fake data with http. but reddit is so heavily dependent on javascript that this simply didn't work out. (they check if you actually click on input fields before they accept the input)

not wanting to mess with javascript too much (at first I thought about integrating a javascript VM) I decided to automate a browser. I took Apple's Safari as it has awesome automation capabilities through the cocoa scripting bridge.

creating accounts this way was nothing more than reading some DOM elements values, solving a captcha and injecting some javascript back. the most complicated part was to figure out the captcha solving API of decaptcher.com ...

it took only a few hours to get everything working and it would take only a few hours more to build in proxy support and to spam reddit (either submitting content or, which is far more interesting, influence public opinion by down/upvoting certain topics)

this project is a proof of concept how easily one can unleash a bot army upon a popuplar social media website. the reliance on javascript makes this more than a trivial task. and captchas itself are more than broken. decaptcher.com will solve a reddit captcha within 15 seconds with nearly 100% accuracy. solving 1000 captchas costs $2.

in its current form this project is useless for any script kiddie spammer; reddit is pretty good at detecting bots and this project doesn't even have support for proxies. to make this work one would need more knowledge and skill than the average blackhat "SEO" will ever have.

but this doesn't mean there aren't people who already are spamming/influencing reddit. it's far too easy if you know what you do.

script kiddie starting guide: clone this repo and type "./build.sh" check out solve.sh to enter your decaptcher.com credentials ./newacc.sh $user $pass will create a new account for you

oh yeah, you will need OS X 10.6+, Safari 5 and XCode for this to work.

fun fact: captcha image alt text on the reddit registration page:

i wonder if these things even work

no they don't.

license: GPL3 (c) Leon Szpilewski, 2011