Spambot

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A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. [1] Web hosts and website operators have responded by banning spammers, leading to an ongoing struggle between them and spammers in which spammers find new ways to evade the bans and anti-spam programs, and hosts counteract these methods. [2]

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Email

Email spambots harvest email addresses from material found on the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited email, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from websites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations. Because email addresses have a distinctive format, such spambots are easy to code.

A number of programs and approaches have been devised to foil spambots. One such technique is address munging , in which an email address is deliberately modified so that a human reader (and/or human-controlled web browser) can interpret it but spambots cannot. This has led to the evolution of more sophisticated spambots that are able to recover email addresses from character strings that appear to be munged, or instead can render the text into a web browser and then scrape it for email addresses. Alternative transparent techniques include displaying all or part of the email address on a web page as an image, a text logo shrunken to normal size using inline CSS, or as text with the order of characters jumbled, placed into readable order at display time using CSS.[ citation needed ]

Forums

Forum spambots browse the internet, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums, and other types of web forms that they can then use to submit bogus content. These often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam messages are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of links to a particular website, to boost its search engine ranking.

One way to prevent spambots from creating automated posts is to require the poster to confirm their intention to post via email. Since most spambot scripts use a fake email address when posting, any email confirmation request is unlikely to be successfully routed to them. Some spambots will pass this step by providing a valid email address and use it for validation, mostly via webmail services. Using methods such as security questions are also proven to be effective in curbing posts generated by spambots, as they are usually unable to answer it upon registering, also on various forums, consistent uploading of spam will also gain the person the title 'spambot'.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email</span> Mail sent using electronic means

Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spamming</span> Unsolicited electronic messages, especially advertisements

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet forum</span> Online discussion site

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes publicly visible.

Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam.

This is a Glossary of Internet Terminology; words pertaining to Internet Technology, a subset of Computer Science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email spam</span> Unsolicited electronic advertising by email

Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.

Address munging is the practice of disguising an e-mail address to prevent it from being automatically collected by unsolicited bulk e-mail providers. Address munging is intended to disguise an e-mail address in a way that prevents computer software from seeing the real address, or even any address at all, but still allows a human reader to reconstruct the original and contact the author: an email address such as, "no-one@example.com", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance.

A Joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using spoofed sender data. Early Joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them, but they are now typically used by commercial spammers to conceal the true origin of their messages and to trick recipients into opening emails apparently coming from a trusted source.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Botnet</span> Collection of compromised internet-connected devices controlled by a third party

A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its connection. The owner can control the botnet using command and control (C&C) software. The word "botnet" is a portmanteau of the words "robot" and "network". The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation.

An Internet bot, web robot, robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale. An Internet bot plays the client role in a client–server model whereas the server role is usually played by web servers. Internet bots are able to perform simple and repetitive tasks much faster than a person could ever do. The most extensive use of bots is for web crawling, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers. More than half of all web traffic is generated by bots.

Email harvesting or scraping is the process of obtaining lists of email addresses using various methods. Typically these are then used for bulk email or spam.

A spamtrap is a honeypot used to collect spam.

The term list poisoning refers to poisoning an e-mail mailing list with invalid e-mail addresses.

On Internet usage, an email bomb is a form of net abuse that sends large volumes of email to an address to overflow the mailbox, overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted in a denial-of-service attack or as a smoke screen to distract the attention from important email messages indicating a security breach.

The Kraken botnet is a network hacking spyware program that attacks Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh systems through email and World Wide Web sites such as social networking sites. It was the world's largest botnet as of April 2008.

Srizbi BotNet is considered one of the world's largest botnets, and responsible for sending out more than half of all the spam being sent by all the major botnets combined. The botnets consist of computers infected by the Srizbi trojan, which sent spam on command. Srizbi suffered a massive setback in November 2008 when hosting provider Janka Cartel was taken down; global spam volumes reduced up to 93% as a result of this action.

Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, trolling and abusive or otherwise unwanted information. Forum spam is usually posted onto message boards by automated spambots or manually with unscrupulous intentions with intent to get the spam in front of readers who would not otherwise have anything to do with it intentionally.

Email spammers have developed a variety of ways to deliver email spam throughout the years, such as mass-creating accounts on services such as Hotmail or using another person's network to send email spam. Many techniques to block, filter, or otherwise remove email spam from inboxes have been developed by internet users, system administrators and internet service providers. Due to this, email spammers have developed their own techniques to send email spam, which are listed below.

Social spam is unwanted spam content appearing on social networking services, social bookmarking sites, and any website with user-generated content. It can be manifested in many ways, including bulk messages, profanity, insults, hate speech, malicious links, fraudulent reviews, fake friends, and personally identifiable information.

A social bot, also described as a social AI or social algorithm, is a software agent that communicates autonomously on social media. The messages it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid) via algorithm. Social bots can also use artificial intelligence and machine learning to express messages in more natural human dialogue.

References

  1. "Tinder Is Being Taken Over by Spambots Posing as Humans". news.com.au. 21 January 2015. Archived from the original on 5 November 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  2. Temperton, James (31 March 2015). "Tinder Cuts Sexy Spambot Traffic by 90 Percent". Wired. Archived from the original on 15 May 2016. Retrieved 2 July 2015.