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Crowdspying: How to spy on mobile the automated way (7)

11-13-2014 10:19 PM #1 aero (Member)
Crowdspying: How to spy on mobile the automated way

iAmAttila's thread about mobile spying made me think and as I like automation, I tried to look inside a few mobile apps that had advertising.

I've coded a little spy tool as a windows software and showed it to a few friends. I then thought I would come here and share my idea with you:

As affiliate marketers you probably have VPN subscriptions already. So why not make a collaborative spy tool.

If some of you would be interested, it would work the following way:

- Install a little piece of software on your pc.
- The software would automatically rotate (change ip) through the locations of your VPN provider and scrape ads for that country/location.

It would then send back the scraped data to a central server for other participant to see.

So in other words each participant would have access to the whole data scraped collaboratively by all running spy tool.

So, what do you think?

11-13-2014 10:31 PM #2 zeno (Administrator)

Hmmm, sounds interesting but wouldn't it be near-impossible to rotate through VPN connections without disrupting our normal behaviour i.e. browsing, downloads, Skype, etc.

Something to leave running in a VM or while away from PC?

11-13-2014 10:36 PM #3 aero (Member)

Running it in a VM or a small windows vps could indeed be a solution to not disrupt normal activities while working on the pc.

And also while away from PC.

I was also thinking at an android app instead of the windows software.

11-13-2014 10:43 PM #4 zeno (Administrator)

A disadvantage with the mobile device would be connectivity - i.e. browsing speed (even if on WiFi), device would get quite warm and drain the battery with the amount of throughput, more complicated to set up, etc.

11-13-2014 10:49 PM #5 aero (Member)

Yeah the mobile version has some pros (It could spy on ads targeted to carriers only. Not disrupt the activities on PC.) but also the issue you just mentionned. The vpn rotator could operate only when charging for instance but yeah, not a perfect solution.

11-14-2014 05:39 AM #6 constantin (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by aero View Post
Yeah the mobile version has some pros (It could spy on ads targeted to carriers only. Not disrupt the activities on PC.) but also the issue you just mentionned. The vpn rotator could operate only when charging for instance but yeah, not a perfect solution.
only if you spoofed the carrier effectively which would require accurate IP blocks and im not even sure if its possible on a mobile phone. the main difference with phone vs. computer in this use case is simply user agent detection which is easily fixed.

11-14-2014 05:58 AM #7 iAmAttila (Veteran Member)

You can have hma automatically rotate ips every x minutes. So you can install your software on a vpn with hma and have it rotate every few minutes and scrape.

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