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Spambots
A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of Spam (electronic), 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 Email spam, 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 huma ... [...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] |
Address Munging
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, "[email protected]", becomes "no-one at example dot com", for instance. Any e-mail address posted in public is likely to be automatically collected by computer software used by bulk emailers (a process known as e-mail address harvesting, e-mail address scavenging). Addresses posted on webpages, Usenet or chat rooms are particularly vulnerable to this. Private e-mail sent between individuals is highly unlikely to be collected, but e-mail sent to a mailing list that is archived and made available via the World Wide Web, web, or passed on to a Usenet news server and made ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spam (electronic)
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 (especially phishing), 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: messaging spam, instant messaging spam, Newsgroup spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, spamdexing, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, classified advertising, online classified ads spam, mobile phone spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Forum spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam (food), Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Spam (Monty Python sketch), Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anti-spam Techniques
Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email (false positives) as opposed to not rejecting all spam email ( false negatives) – and the associated costs in time, effort, and cost of wrongfully obstructing good mail. Anti-spam techniques can be broken into four broad categories: those that require actions by individuals, those that can be automated by email administrators, those that can be automated by email senders and those employed by researchers and law enforcement officials. End-user techniques There are a number of techniques that individuals can use to restrict the availability of their email addresses, with the goal of reducing their chance of receiving spam. Discretion Sharing an email address only among a limited group of correspondents is one way to limit the chance that the address will be "harve ... [...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] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
