[Case Study] Hacking the funnels (part 2)

I’ve already covered a lot of stuff through the previous post, however there’s some stuff left to take into consideration.

Stuff that’s commercial but offered for free elsewhere.

First and foremost, if you do proper research you can get paid items for free.

Let’s take the Lumieres theme for example which can be obtained here for free and here for $17.

Getting to the insecure download pages.

This is easy to do, however what’s even easier is getting actual paid/premium stuff for free by finding the hidden download pages:

These are just three examples of what you can find by doing a basic Google search as at least 1/3 of the folks selling digital products via Clickbank, JVZoo or WarriorForum have insecure download pages.

And that’s not all. Some pages/directories can be determined from the robots.txt exclusion and also sitemap.xml as folks either try to “secure” their download pages by excluding them from robots.txt (which is public and readable) or forget to exclude them from their sitemap:

Finding insecure directory indexes.

Another way to find downloadable stuff is to search the directory indexes as a lot of sites have them open and allow them to be indexed in search engines:

Finding public S3 buckets.

Moving forward, the last method to get premium content for free is to find out insecure S3 buckets where internet marketers host their stuff.

In order to find these insecure S3 buckets all you have to do is look for their bonuses or free stuff links and check where they are downloading from. If it’s an S3 bucket then you can use this tool to rip everything in the bucket.

If you know what to search for you can even find public S3 buckets using Google and if you’re lucky you can find premium stuff with licenses included:

NOTE: The scope of this article is to act as a proof of concept for educational purposes only and the author intention isn’t to encourage or endorse illegal activities in any way, but actually to provide a plausible scenario of the reality behind illegal streaming websites.