When Douban user “jenny_junyi” woke up last Sunday, she found a surprise waiting for her in her Douban account. Overnight, she had apparently watched a movie called Runaway Woman, and rated it five stars (the highest possible rating on Douban). Lots of other users had a similar experience that day, learning from their Douban accounts that they really loved the movie Runaway Woman. But of course, none of them had actually ever seen it.
What happened, according to China’s the Evening News, is that hackers were able to access hundreds of Douban users’ accounts and use them to rate Runaway Woman with five stars. It was effective enough to bring the film’s previously-terrible rating all the way up to a seven out of ten before the news of the hack began to spread and the resultant wave of downvotes came crashing down (the film is now at around five out of ten and headed downwards).
Representatives for the film’s production company denied involvement in the hacks, saying that they lacked the capability to do something like that, and suggesting that it was probably just a prank being played by children. Douban representatives told the Evening News that the company does monitor comments and ratings for suspicious behavior, and notifies users and deletes the relevant comments if it thinks something doesn’t look right.
It’s the sort of story that would be kind of funny if it weren’t indicative of a concerning larger trend. Hacked and zombie accounts are often used to give credibility to products that can’t otherwise get it on the Chinese internet, and while bad movies are fairly harmless, fake medicines or poor-quality toys (for example) are less so; the same techniques could just as easily be used to inflate the customer review numbers of products like those on e-commerce sites, especially C2C sites like Taobao. Moreover, its likely that as with other hacks, user passwords and other data were stolen as a part of the Douban hacks, meaning that users other accounts and possibly even their identities could also be compromised.
It’s yet another reminder to be very careful where you share your important data when you’re on the web. And if you’re a Douban user, you may want to log in to your account and double-check whether you, too, have “seen” Runaway Woman.
(Evening News via Techweb)
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