Diary of a kind-hearted hacker: Part 1
LinkedIn is not safe anymore… And it never was!
DISCLAIMER: This article translated from a private blog of Chinese hacker community. The author of the translation does not take any responsibility about the content of the original article.
LinkedIn never loved me… The thing is, it has the most valuable database in the world, and I unluckily am the man, who periodically had to “take” information from that database. Back in 2015 they blocked my original account and not to mention hundreds of fake ones. Things got even worse after Microsoft bought them, and, at that time, I really stopped to “support” people who want any kind of data from LinkedIn.
But recently, I won’t say why, I won’t say for what (oops, there’s a girl in the story), but I needed a fake LinkedIn account. So, where to begin…
Nationality and Profile Picture
My “alter-ego” (let’s call him that way, despite the fact that I never wanted to be him) should have a nationality pretty close to me, but never the same, so I started to look for my country in the list of socialist-leaning ones. In virtue of inspiration I got from recent reads (Jerzy Żuławski and Stanisław Lem), I decided to be from Poland.
I took first and last names from two different Polish film directors (because I’m fond of their cinematography). With all the power of Google, it took me about 10 minutes to find a Polish email provider and register a valid email with .pl suffix. And, as our dear LinkedIn doesn’t require a phone verification (yeah, it’ll definitely scare away some hackers and lazy users by the way), my account was ready.
Yet, I was not so creative when choosing the profile picture of me. I typed thispersondoesnotexist.com in the browser, refreshed a few times, and voilà! These days of AI… They keep people from thinking by themselves.
Yeah, and background picture, of course. Nowadays, it must be as optimistic and politically correct as it gets. But for the final choice, I should have a current company, where I’m working at.
Experience and Education
The hardest part for me was figuring out an appropriate company for me. It should not have been a big one, should be valid or at least searchable and desirably should not have a page in LinkedIn. After some hours of searching, all these conditions matched — I had changed a word in a small, Warsaw-located company’s name. In some places it even could be found with this name…
Then I pointed myself as “Head Of Human Resources” of this company and took one of the associated pictures as my background image. Also, I could finally figure out my main profession. After that, it was a matter of laziness not to write the rest of my scholarship-based career in one of the biggest universities in Poland.
Popularity
Unlike Facebook, it’s always easier to find friends/followers on LinkedIn. First I looked for people with no profile picture and usually not familiar with LinkedIn that much.
After the first 10–20 connections, they started to come by themselves. It’s always useful to have “Head of Human Resources” of some company connected. By the way, I shouldn’t have spent that much effort on selection of my company, as many of them didn’t even look at it. It is a pity nowadays, that many of that CEOs, CTOs and other “Os” are just well-structured swells. And this trick actually works…
LinkedIn publicly tracks any activity, such as likes, reactions, comments. Thus, it was much easier to have a hundred of them and keeping the profile itself popular. So, after a week I had a full-fledged profile without any suspicion of being fake.
Conclusion
What I have done with the profile?
Well, it’s deleted. I deleted it right after this experiment. And I’m telling you again — this was only in the name of science.
What could I do with the profile?
In these days of donations, crowdfunds and flashy charity, I really could drive my imagination hard and find some profitable usages of this profile, but I didn’t. Because I’m a kind-hearted hacker…
