HTTP Log Messenger v1.0

23 July 2011

One of the problems hacktivists ran into when trying to disseminate useful information to people in Syria and Egypt was how to get through to people when DNS and web access are being filtered or outright blocked. Putting up web pages containing phone numbers of ISPs volunteering dialup access was something of a crapshoot because there was no guarantee that people would be able to view them. Someone (I don't remember whom) hit on the idea of contacting sysadmins in the Middle East by leaving messages in the access and error logs of their web servers. This works but pumping an entire list of phone numbers, usernames, and passwords by hand over HTTP requests gets old fast, to say the least. Then, it came to my attention yesterday that the government of Syria was tightening the screws once again by cutting off utilities in some cities, including water, power, and locking down net.access. I sat down this afternoon and put together a quick utility in Python that automates the process using only the standard Python libraries so you won't have to install any extra modules. I wrote it to be as simple to use as possible, so glance at the README file and online help before running it. The only things you need to run the utility are text files containing a list of IP addresses or hostnames of web servers to push the information to (one to a line) and the messages that you want to leave (such as phone numbers, usernames, and passwords of ISPs donating connectivity to the Middle East, or the IP addresses and port numbers of Tor bridges (but not too many because there is a limited number of bridges and certain governmental organizations around the world block them when they find them!)

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