Kinopoisk: with tens of thousands of hacked accounts scored a rating of the film "Crimea"

On September 28, 2017, the film “Crimea” by Alexei Pimanov was released. According to the description, this is “a story about love, faith and honor, strength of mind and true friendship against the background of real events of the Crimean spring of 2014”. A third-rate film with an estimate of 2,094 would not have aroused any interest if it were not for the efforts of unknown perpetrators who put a rating on him on the most popular Russian kinosayte "Film Search".

Cheating rating was carried out through the hacked accounts of real users. On the eve of the premiere, some users noticed that they had a mark in their profile about waiting for the film "Crimea", although they did not put such a mark. Fake votes turned out to be at least 53 thousand , that is, tens of thousands of accounts were hacked.

“All the dishonest marks about waiting for the release of the film“ Crimea ”were blocked and are no longer displayed in user accounts,” said Yulia Babikova, PR director of Kinopoisk, in a commentary to RBC.

After the bots cleared from the bots, the number of marks in the rating of expectations decreased from 70 to 17 thousand, and the rating of expectations dropped from 65% to 20%.
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The rating of the film about the love of a journalist from Kiev and a resident of Sevastopol has now dropped to a record low of 2,094 points. It is difficult to find another film of such low quality, although the Russian state allocated more than 400 million rubles for its filming, and the Ministry of Defense involved real military equipment.

Note: the wait rating works as follows: the user puts a mark on what is waiting for a certain film (for example, the movie “Thor Ragnarok” now also has 70 thousand such marks as “Krym” had), and with the release of the movie it will receive a notice . In turn, all other users can see which films have the highest waiting rating. Especially convenient to watch the rating for movies that go to rent today.

Investigation of one of the Pikabu users showed that, at the same time as the rating was raised for Crimea, the bots merged the ratings of other films that were released on the same day on September 28.

The Kinopoisk technical support staff intends to notify users whose accounts have been compromised about the need to change the password to a more complex one, and not to use the same passwords for different services. Apparently, it was one of the most massive hacks in the history of Runet: a certain intruder had passwords to the accounts of tens of thousands of users. Perhaps this botnet has already been used for other cheats. For example, to display certain fake news on the top of Twitter, which are then voiced on TV as real news from the twitter top (one of the methods that unscrupulous journalists actually use).

PS Users report that the trailers of the film “Crimea” are being wound on YouTube.