Tactical Distributed Social Resource Depletion.

Publicated on : 1192590534
I guess I coined a new buzzword here, but hear me out. One thing that bothers me is stumbleupon. That place and browser toolbar where surfers can discover websites and rate them. The thing is, it is a very clever concept that can be (ab)used to skyrocket traffic to a website. It can actually be used for a tactical distributed social resource depletion.

Imagine a website that has a limit 10GIG of data traffic. In the early days when data traffic was really expensive, we image sourced another website. This meant, that we hot linked large JPG's from other websites, and thereby depleting it's resources, or traffic. Which resulted in a large bill for the enemy in question. This can still be done, only we can do it with other means. This is where stumbleupon comes into view. Users submit sites, and around 4 million people use stumbleupon online or in their browser. It is possible to submit multiple links to one website and thereby creating a systematic resource depletion. How do I know? because I am listed on stumbleupon, and they send around 100.000 visitors in 25 days to my website. Sure, I can handle 100K but not everyone can afford bandwidth. Unwillingly, a social bookmark site could be used in resource depletion.

Imagine we have an enemy. He has movies on his site which are 100MB each. We could link them up on stumbleupon, send 200K to 300K traffic, and you bet ya: it's host will shut the site down or sends him a fat bill to pay. You do the math, 300K times 100MB times $1 for every GIG, and you know that isn't funny anymore. I see ways, and potential in social bookmark sites that can be abused this way. Just a matter of imagination and an enemy.