Hacking NameCheap’s Trivia Competition

In case you didn’t know NameCheap are having a trivia competition over the next 15 days through Twitter and there are a lot of active participants. NameCheap’s account on Twitter lists nearly 8,000 followers so with 360 questions and 3 prizes being awarded, there’s a 1-in-8 chance of winning a prize.

The fastest two correct answers get a prize and another person is selected at random from the correct answers. Therefore, it makes you wonder if it’s fair and how could it be hacked.

Is it fair? I don’t know enough about Twitter’s infrastructure but I guess that people in the US have an advantage over those elsewhere. There’s bound to be a time delay but whether it’s of the order of a few seconds or a few milliseconds I wouldn’t know. I guess somebody will correct me in the comments.

As for hacking the competition, well NameCheap make it easy to play along. They provide you with a list of winners on their competition page. So if you can’t be bothered to find out what the answer is yourself, just look at the Twitter profiles for those people at the top of the list, grab their answers, look for discrepancies and then submit your answer.

With a third of the prizes going to people with a correct answer it’s acutally a simple way of getting a prize — thanks NameCheap.

And if you were really desperate you could just script a solution. Grab the top scorers lists from NameCheap, grab the latest tweets from the Top 5 people and if 4 of them agree on an answer send it. You too could then play 24 hours a day and maybe pickup a free domain or two.