Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

Just Because Im Paranoid Doesnt Mean They’re Not Watching You Hosted on Zooomr

TiVo’s Blue Moon video may have turned out to be a viral marketing stunt, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying to figure out the source behind the campaign. When I first found out that the video was part of a larger ad campaign, I speculated that B|W|R Public Relations may have been behind the viral ad. Without having any real concrete evidence I decided to dig deeper to see if I could find better evidence so I could prove which marketing firm was behind the campaign. Since the TiVo Community Forum wasn’t willing to release the IP address of the original poster of the blue moon video, I decided I would set a TiVo Alien trap to find out if I could unlock another clue in this mystery.

Having already developed a link between the marketing campaign and the TiVoisAliens website, I figured that it would be easy to catch a busy PR exec napping and I proceeded to send TiVoisAliens a nice welcome letter to let him know that he had already earned one RSS subscriber even though he didn’t offer feeds yet. In the letter, I made sure to include a link to my blog baiting him into clicking on it and thereby revealing his identity through the IP information picked up by my traffic software. It took more then a day, but sure enough he took the bait and I immedietely began looking for the real crash site coordinates that TiVo was broadcasting from.

The Real Crash Site Hosted on Zooomr

At first I felt pretty pleased that my trap had been a success, but I quickly realized that I had been wrong about TiVoisAliens being a PR hack when he demonstrated real geek skills by cracking into my computer and changing my Firefox profile. Ironically, the first time I realized that I had been hacked was when I went to comment on the news that Weaknees could still hack the series 3 to add bigger hard drives. Hidden deep within my auto fill information TiVoisAliens managed to send me a warning to Watch Out For Killer Robots.

Zatz Not An Alien Hosted on Zooomr

I was hoping that somehow my system could prove who did the hacking, but he did a good job of hiding his tracks. He even retitled my profile folder hmmmm just to toy with me. I am sure that there is a way that I could launch some kind of counter attack by baiting him into trying it again, but with my limited geek background, I barely was able to locate some unusual files that were modified shortly after he read my email. A quick Google search of some of these files warn of a backdoor trojan that grants access to your mainframe, but none of them reveal which actual backdoor tool was used.

strange modifications Hosted on Zooomr

I now know that I’m likely dealing with a very tech saavy TiVo employee and not some underground marketing “special unit” like I had thought. I also know that it’s not a good idea to upset him because he is very paranoid. I suppose I could have toned down my email to him a bit, but I felt it was a coherent, well thought out attempt at a legitimate dialouge and clearly he must have taken something I had said the wrong way.

YoU make good CASE for TiVo’s Aliens proof, but I no who U R and HAVE will
exPose Ur MisINFOrmAtion Champaign. I Was aBle to Find AlaN and I CAN
findz U. I will S00N haVe New SecreT TiVO width Time Shifting PoRTAL
and I While Go 2 Future 2 Find U.