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Spambot
A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. 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. 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-control ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internet Bots
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. Efforts by web servers to restrict bots vary. Some servers have a robots.txt file that contains the rules governing bot behavior on that server. Any bot that does not follow the rules could, in theory, be denied access to or removed from the affected website. If the posted text file has no associated program/software/app, then adhering to the rules is e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to deter bot attacks and spam. The term was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (computer scientist), John Langford. It is a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." A historically common type of CAPTCHA (displayed as reCAPTCHA v1) was first invented in 1997 by two groups working in parallel. This form of CAPTCHA requires entering a sequence of letters or numbers from a distorted image. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, CAPTCHAs are sometimes described as reverse Turing tests. Two widely used CAPTCHA services are Google's reCAPTCHA and the independent hC ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Votebots
A votebot is a software automation built to fraudulently participate in online polls, elections, and to upvote and downvote on social media. Simple votebots are easy to code and deploy, yet they are often effective against many polls online, as the developer of the poll software must take this kind of attack into account and do extra work to defend against it. Technique used The WWW uses the HTTP protocol to transfer information. Votebots are designed to imitate legitimate user behaviour, such as voting in an online poll by interacting with the server hosting the poll using the HTTP protocol. The bot thus emulates the behavior of a human using a web browser, but can repeat this emulated behavior many times, thus casting many votes. Distinguishing bots from humans In many voting projects, developers try to distinguish bots from legitimate users. For example, some websites restrict the number of votes one IP address can make in a time period. Votebots frequently bypass this ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Email Spam
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Spam (Monty Python), Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam (food), Spam," is used repetitively, mirroring the intrusive nature of unwanted emails. Since the early 1990s, spam has grown significantly, with estimates suggesting that by 2014, it comprised around 90% of all global email traffic. Spam is primarily a financial burden for the recipient, who may be required to manage, filter, or delete these unwanted messages. Since the expense of spam is mostly borne by the recipient, it is effectively a form of "postage due" advertising, where the recipient bears the cost of unsolicited messages. This cost imposed on recipients, without compensation from the sender, makes spam an example of a "negative externality" (a side effect of an activity that affects others who are not involved in the decision). The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Web Crawler
Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spidering''). Web search engines and some other websites use Web crawling or spidering software to update their web content or indices of other sites' web content. Web crawlers copy pages for processing by a search engine, which Index (search engine), indexes the downloaded pages so that users can search more efficiently. Crawlers consume resources on visited systems and often visit sites unprompted. Issues of schedule, load, and "politeness" come into play when large collections of pages are accessed. Mechanisms exist for public sites not wishing to be crawled to make this known to the crawling agent. For example, including a robots.txt file can request Software agent, bots to index only parts of a website, or nothing at all. The number of In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Botnet
A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more Internet bot, bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send Spamming, 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 "Computer network, network". The term is usually used with a negative or malicious connotation. Overview A botnet is a logical collection of Internet-connected devices, such as computers, smartphones or Internet of things (IoT) devices whose Computer security, security have been breached and control ceded to a third party. Each compromised device, known as a "bot," is created when a device is penetrated by software from a ''malware'' (malicious software) distribution. The controller of a botnet is able to direct the activities of these comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phishing
Phishing is a form of social engineering and a scam where attackers deceive people into revealing sensitive information or installing malware such as viruses, worms, adware, or ransomware. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim navigates the site, and transverses any additional security boundaries with the victim. As of 2020, it is the most common type of cybercrime, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Internet Crime Complaint Center reporting more incidents of phishing than any other type of cybercrime. The term "phishing" was first recorded in 1995 in the cracking toolkit AOHell, but may have been used earlier in the hacker magazine '' 2600''. It is a variation of ''fishing'' and refers to the use of lures to "fish" for sensitive information. Measures to prevent or reduce the impact of phishing attacks include legislation, user educa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spider Trap
A spider trap (or crawler trap) is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler or search bot to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash. Web crawlers are also called web spiders, from which the name is derived. Spider traps may be created to "catch" spambots or other crawlers that waste a website's bandwidth. They may also be created unintentionally by calendars that use dynamic pages with links that continually point to the next day or year. Common techniques used include: * Creation of indefinitely deep directory structures such as http://example.com/abc/def/abc/def/abc/def/abc/... * Dynamic pages that produce an unbounded number of documents for a web crawler to follow. Examples include calendars and algorithmically generated language poetry. * Documents filled with many characters, crashing the lexical analyzer parsing the document. * Documents with session-id's based on required ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spamtrap
A spamtrap is a honeypot used to collect spam. Spamtraps are usually e-mail addresses that are created not for communication, but rather to lure spam. In order to prevent legitimate email from being invited, the e-mail address will typically only be published in a location hidden from view such that an automated e-mail address harvester (used by spammers) can find the email address, but no sender would be encouraged to send messages to the email address for any legitimate purpose. Since no e-mail is solicited by the owner of this spamtrap e-mail address, any e-mail messages sent to this address are immediately considered unsolicited. The term is a compound of the words "spam" and "trap", because a spam analyst will lay out spamtraps to catch spam in the same way that a fur trapper lays out traps to catch wild animals. The provenance of this term is unknown, but several competing anti-spam organizations claim trademark over it. Industry uses An untainted spamtrap can continue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rustock Botnet
The Rustock botnet was a botnet that operated from around 2006 until March 2011. It consisted of computers running Microsoft Windows, and was capable of sending up to 25,000 spam messages per hour from an infected PC. At the height of its activities, it sent an average of 192 spam messages per compromised machine per minute. Reported estimates on its size vary greatly across different sources, with claims that the botnet may have comprised anywhere between 150,000 and 2,400,000 machines. The size of the botnet was increased and maintained mostly through self-propagation, where the botnet sent many malicious e-mails intended to infect machines opening them with a trojan which would incorporate the machine into the botnet. The botnet took a hit after the 2008 takedown of McColo, an ISP which was responsible for hosting most of the botnet's command and control servers. McColo regained Internet connectivity for several hours, and in those hours up to 15 Mbit a second of traffic was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Poisoning
The term list poisoning refers to poisoning an e-mail mailing list with invalid e-mail addresses. Industry uses Once a mailing list has been poisoned with a number of invalid e-mail addresses, the resources required to send a message to this list has increased, even though the number of valid recipients has not. If one can poison a spammer's mailing list, one can force the spammer to exhaust more resources to send e-mail, in theory costing the spammer money and time. Poisoning spammers' mailing lists is usually done by blacklists submitting fake information to email submit style offers, or by posting invalid email addresses in a Usenet forum or on a web page where spammers are believed to harvest email addresses for their mailing lists. Vulnerabilities * Syntactically invalid email addresses used to poison a mailing list could be easily filtered out by the spammers, while using email addresses that are syntactically correct could cause problems for the mail server responsible ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
