Fusking

About

Fusking (sometimes known as Fuskering) is a method of extracting photos from private galleries on free image hosting services.

Origin

The word “fusking” stems from a Danish word^[12] used to describe a person who was secretly doing work outside of their established trade. The first code written using this name was created by CarthagTuek, the handle of a Danish man named Mikkel Eriksen, early as 2002. He announced the third version of a script site known as Fusker on his blog Sensible Erection^[2] on March 5th, 2002. The site, which is only now available as an archive^[13], utilized a Perl CGI script that was coded similarly to a UNIX/Linux cURL tool to find a library of similarly named files on any image hosting website.

Spread

On March 20th, 2002, CarthagTuek posted a LiveJournal entry^[14] claiming his site had received 250 megabytes of traffic in one day and was the third top referrer to a lesbian pornography site. When another user asked if he was going to take down Fusker, CarthageTuek stated that he was waiting for a cease and desist.

By September 2006, fusking started to appear on the photo sharing site Photobucket^[16], popular with MySpace users. Even if a user marked their album as private, fuskers could bypass Photobucket’s settings by guessing exact URLs for the images based on common file names, for example IMG, DSCF or PICT. The earliest mention of the tech forum Rohitab^[15] on September 27th, 2008, where a user proved the exploit with screenshots of a locked album.

Five days after the forum post, FuskerFind^[9] was launched, where users could tag previously fusked links to make them searchable. Months later, in May 2007, a thread about fusking was posted on the BodyBuilding forums.^[17] A year later, in March 2008, a Photobucket-specific fusker site, PhotoFusker^[11] was launched. That year, the act was discussed on the paintball enthusiast forum PBNation^[18], hackers.org^[21] and the Nav.Net forum^[19], who also launched a Fusking program^[8] that year. 2008 also marked the first year fusking was discussed in the mainstream news media, when Fox 11 in Los Angeles covered the Photobucket exploit, but did not use the term “fusking” when describing the incident

Over the next three years, threads about fusking were posted on the Black Hat World forum^[22] and eBaum’s World^[5], with an Urban Dictionary^[20] definition added in May 2009. On October 6th, 2011, a subreddit titled Photobucket Plunders^[6] was established as a place for fuskers to post their findings. Buzzfeed^[4] and Gawker^[3] subsequently drew attention to this community, and its companion /r/RequestA Plunder^[7] in August 2012, revealing the simple method to retrieve private photos and Photobucket’s relative ignorance of the exploit.