Cheating online games /polls / contests by using anonumous HTTP proxies / python

This post is indeed about cheating. You know those browser-based game profile refs that provide you with some benefits each time a persons clicks it? Thats right, everybody spammed them here and there, some people had many visitors, some had not. I wanted to gain some extra funds too, but the thing I hate more than not-having-extra-funds is spamming... I just felt bad about posting that ref anywhere it was possible, like:

Check out these hot chicks <a href="#stupid_game_ref#">photos</a>

It's quite obvious, that clicking the link again and again yourself didn't have much effect. Only requests with unique IP numbers (daily) where generating profit.  So the question was how to access an URI from many IP from one PC (my PC that is). The answer is simple: by using anonymous HTTP proxies.

There are many sites that aggregate lists of free proxies, like proxy-list.org. It's best to find a site that enables fetching proxy IP/PORT data in a script processable way (many sites have captchas). 

Let's get to the fun part, the following script executes specific actions for each proxy in the provided list.

  1 import socket
  2 import urllib
  3 import time
  4    
  5 HEADERS = {"User-Agent" : "Mozilla/5.0" }
  6    
  7 proxies = ["10.10.1.1:8080", "192.168.1.1:80"]
  8    
  9 #timeout in case proxy does not respond
 10 socket.setdefaulttimeout(5)
 11
 12 for proxy in proxies:
 13     opener = urllib.FancyURLopener({"http" : proxy})
 14     opener.addheaders = HEADERS.items()
 15     try:
 16         res = opener.open("http://some.uri/?ref=123456")
 17         res.read()
 18         time.sleep(3)
 19     except:
 20         print "Proxy %s is probably dead :-(" % proxy
 21        
Line 5 contains a basic User-Agent header, you can find more about setting the appropriate headers here. Line 10 sets the default socket timeout on 5 seconds - many proxies tend not to work 24/7, so best catch those exceptions.  Finally we create an opener from each IP and request some resources (our ref link), you might replace this simple request with a set of actions, or even make bots that act via proxies. Just make sure you're proxy is truly anonymous (easy to verify by a simple PHP script) .


This may be called cheating, but at least it's not spamming :-)


~KR