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So we welcome to the next talk,
we start a little earlier than announced
in the schedule.
Megacorp is the name of a huge
conglomerate, you may know from science
fiction, but megacorp is real.
It exists actually.
Its mission is to acquire all fraudulent
and scam companies that populate the
Internet and even already have tried
to scam you.
So Megacorp is an umbrella corporation
that includes all schang, companies,
scam companies, and it's a piece
of art. So please welcome the two
artists, Linda Coleman
and lastingly, who will talk to you, tell
you everything you need to know about
Megacorp.
Hello, my name is Andrea
Singular, and together with my partner,
Linda Coleman, we will present
you our recent artistic research
project.
The title of our talk is Trust
US and Our Business Will Expand,
visualizing fake websites from the
Artist Against Forbes Online
Database.
OK, I want to briefly introduce
ourselves.
We work under the collective name
Chiros. Over the last five years,
we have been focusing on Internet
fraud, Internet scams
as a main topic of our
artistic research.
And we are researching
into
different vigilante communities
that try to
stop Internet fraud and to jam
the working practices
of Internet scammers.
And one of these subgroups
is called the Artists Against
Fraud Online. As you see a
screenshot here of their
database website.
And when you visit the AA
for one line database, you can
open the different links that you see.
And these links are
entries that are reported,
fake companies.
They are reported to the hosting
providers. And there are in the process
of being checked by the hosting providers
and then taken offline.
So it can happen that these websites
disappear rather quickly from
this list and are after
a couple of hours, not working anymore.
And they couldn't find a overview
or a visualization on
what kind of companies
are these fake Web sites and
what do they represent.
And this leads us to start
working on an artwork that
tries to visualize this
repository.
So looking at the tactics
of these vigilante communities,
we can find out tactics
and new tactics that they use
or the tactics were
like bandwidth hogging or deters attacks,
they are using self programed software
called Marquito or Let Vampyre.
And basically it was free
of our programs, Web based
applications.
That was very
easy to use.
You just started up the program
and left it running in the background.
The program was repeatedly downloading
images and e-mail
files from the same website until
the bandwidth limit was exceeded.
Once the website was shut down
by the hosting company, they would
either refuse to host
the website again or would
insist to charge a higher
fee to the fraudster
because he's using more of
the the bandwidth.
So some present tactics
include that the members
are collecting evidence and information
about these fake websites
that they try to prove
or at least to raise the suspicion
that this company
website is a fake business.
They write complaint letters to the
hosting providers and in general
try to maintain good relation
to the hosting providers and to
the law enforcement that they
collaborate with.
So when we look at some of the open
source intelligence tools that
they are using, then
we see that they
cross-check whois and DNS
entries.
They contact the official website
owners and see what who
is repeating there and who is answering
their questions.
They crawl the web for copies of
the website.
They check registers
in the specific countries
that the company claims to be registered.
If there is any official files
about it, they even
visit the physically addresses
to see if the company is located
there.
And there are many other tools available.
But we wanted to also focus
on the tools and on the stretch of this
that this online community
is using.
So, yeah, the
who is look up, you see
who owns the domain, and
the retired will tell you the registrar,
the company where the domain was
purchased through, when it was
created, when it expires,
and as well, additional contact details.
And one of the key observations
is to look for how long
this Web site or the domain
has been registered.
Often members say
that if a domain is
active for less than a year,
but on their page, they claim to
be a well established business,
then it's maybe already
suspicious. And it's one that should
be further steps taken to look
at the Web site.
Then, of course, the contact information
like what are the ways to get in touch
with the website owner?
Are the emails that are used?
Are they part of the top level
domain or are they using free email
services?
Is it a valid address?
Can you find it on different
map services
or the phone numbers provided can you
call it during business hours and
so on?
So sometimes you can also
check the e-mail code and see
if they're if the website was copied
or scraped before from a different
domain, for example.
This is a screenshot of
an Austrian company.
It's called State Office.
It's registered in Vienna.
But when you look at the HTML
code, you see that the website
was copied from a domain,
which is Saanich Solutions
and 19th of October.
And this company, Saanich Solutions,
you find again in the database
from the Artist Against Form online.
So it looked
like that they just
made a copy of a
fraudulent website and
created a new logo and published it under
a different domain name.
A lot of the fake sites can be found by
searching for text phrases
or sentences,
therefore you can find other fake
websites or the original page
where text has been copied
from.
For this, actually, they use different
plagiarism checkers like
these copies kape,
but there are different
other programs that you can use.
That was just one example.
Once they get these different information
that should raise suspicion or
proof that it's a fake
company, they start filing
a report.
They also have generators
to do that or to assist in
these steps going through it,
basically to contact the hosting
providers and the registrar.
And they look for other possibilities
to warn potential victims
or other
organizations like in Austria.
There is the watch list Internet, where
you can report fake businesses
or some of the scam baiting
community members also set up
websites and platforms like
like this scam Varner's where you
can discuss business proposals
or search for
these fake websites.
And of course, you should also report
it to the artist against Form
online so that they can include it in
their database.
And that already being
listed in this database can
be dealt with
as an argument to further explore
a fake business.
So as Andrea's earlier
told, we were curious to find out
what kind of businesses were represented
on the fake Web sites.
We wanted to comment on the template
based esthetics of today's company
representations, and we wanted to put
an emphasis on the structures
of centralization of money and power.
The inspiration we took from science
fiction, as was told in
our introduction,
especially from William Gibson, who
actually coined the term megacorp
as a big evil corporation
that wants to take over the world,
and these megacorp
are operated in operate
in several industries and are
most often described as monopolistic
conglomerates.
So in science fiction,
there are many examples of Mega Karp's
some of the logos.
We have also seen people wearing here
at the conference, for example, the
Tyrel Corporation from Blade
Runner or the Whale and a tiny
carp from Alien.
But of course, there are many more.
And then there are the
real world examples, maybe
the East Indian trade company
that is often.
To have been the first multinational
corporation in the world is a good
example, it had
Stockmann Napoleone space
trade issued their own stocks
and and also had
an army that protected their trading
ships.
And another
real world
example could be the Saudi
Aramco. This is the world's most
valuable, valuable megacorp
with the world's largest crude oil
reserves, and I
quote from their two thousand and
fourteen facts and figures report
from building roads, railroads,
schools and hospitals to establishing
wildlife sanctuaries and growing
knowledge economy.
We have always been engaged
in improving the quality of life for
the people of Saudi Arabia.
And, of course, we know a lot of
other megacorp
also in the tech world.
So
this is our megacorp
and these fictional and real
world examples where our sources
for creating
our megacorp, which is every civilization
of 1000 fake companies.
To start with, we had one challenge
when websites were listed in
the database of the hosting providers
of DANHOF hosting providers block
the websites so
we could not go back to the websites
to analyze them.
The database only saves the name
of the website and who has the
information.
And this was not enough for us to
actually have time to look at the
website.
So we decided to scrape one
thousand websites and this took us
about four months to get
our sample probe.
We were not doing this on a daily basis.
So this graph here doesn't
really show how many fake Web
sites were reported during this time.
But anyhow, it gives a picture
of of how and when
we scraped them.
And the next step was to go
to all these websites and
see what information we could find
and how we could categorize the Web
sites, and within this
process we categorize the company
starting with 31 different
categories and then merging them
to tend to have kind of
something that makes sense in the end.
So these are business segments
of megacorp, and
here you see that transport and logistics
are the biggest one, followed by banks
that are usually used for
phishing attacks and are most
often clones of real websites.
Maybe a surprise is the fourth biggest
business segment, which is online
pet shops and animal transport.
We also looked into the
claim headquarter locations
of the company's
UK with two hundred and twenty companies
and the London area with hundred
and eighteen companies really stands out.
Also, there are 22 percent
of the websites that are not given
don't give any location for their
activities.
This and more information we collected
into a website and printed
interim report.
We also have a couple of copies
with us, so please come and
get yours after the presentations
we have there.
Also, like
the the dates are kind
of put into segments, into
the different business segments.
Where do the headquarters of different
business segments,
where are they positioned and so on.
And of course, because it's an interim
report and we kind of had
annual reports as our
as our inspiration, the report also
states the mission and the mission.
And of course, we have a letter from
the CEOs as well.
So besides the interim report,
the installation set up is created
to look like a professional
representation of a corporate
withdrawal up state of isolation
visualizations, a PC
where you can browse through this great
website.
We have several widows playing in
the gallery, one showing the key figures
of megacorp in a corporate
showreel with fancy animations and
uplifting music.
Another video shows our attempt to visit
the companies and show what buildings
and businesses are located
at the real addresses in this case
of in the case of banks like this one
in Akron, and the building
really exists while the website
is a clone.
Other times we ended up in weird
places like this residential area
in Glasgow.
This building should be the headquarters
of an international credit union.
Obviously, their address was just chosen
randomly.
Megacorp also has three headquarters
in Hamburg and
that we plan to visit actually during
this conference, one is actually
really close to here,
down to the 14
logistic company called Multi Logistics
dot com should be located.
This is how it looks like
and there is no multiple-entry
fix there, so.
A third video shows
the main features of the website
here, for example, of one of the eight
Web sites that sells chemicals
and powders to clean black money.
The website connects to an e-mail
scam called Black Money Scam.
This is a scam.
You need to buy special chemicals
to wash off DFAC black currency.
So to conclude, we wanted to create
artwork that visually visualizes
the effort that this scam baiting
community is doing and
to create a time capsule of fake
websites.
So thank you.
And at megacorp dot com
dot org, you can visit
the websites,
they are there are screenshots in the
gallery set up.
We actually have the real website.
But there you also see the different
segments and how many
companies are in each segment
and where they are located.
And the reports are.
So thank you very much.
The representatives of megacorp
for you in deciding top please line up
at the microphones if you have any
questions. We have still ten minutes
left, so go ahead.
Completes one of the audio angels
will do with Mike.
So did the
companies behind this fake site
ever try to retaliate by
threatening or attacking your website?
So you're are asking if some of the
fraudulent company owners were
trying to attack
our website or try to have your website
get on or do anything against
you, or is it just like it's just
Kobe busting and they don't don't care of
what's happening?
No, we didn't have any of these
cases yet.
I often like within the artist
against four online forums.
I often read that
the scammers or the criminals
are registered and they count.
And then they claim that, hey,
we are a real business.
Take my website off your
database because this is bad
reputation for our customers and so
on. So thank
you.
Next start, any questions
from the Internet.
So I would say if there are
no questions left, I think there is
there someone go?
So I would say thank you very
much on a warm round of applause for
the caller.
Thank you very much.