A spambot is a
computer program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...
designed to assist in the sending of
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
. 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
Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...
spambots harvest
email addresses An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineeri ...
from material found on the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited email, also known as
spam
Spam most often refers to:
* Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation
* Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages
** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
...
. Such spambots are
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 spider ...
s 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
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 soft ...
'', in which an email address is deliberately modified so that a human reader (and/or human-controlled
web browser
A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
) 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
Alternative or alternate may refer to:
Arts, entertainment and media
* Alternative (Kamen Rider), Alternative (''Kamen Rider''), a character in the Japanese TV series ''Kamen Rider Ryuki''
* Alternative comics, or independent comics are an altern ...
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.
Forums
''Forum spambots'' browse the internet, looking for
guestbooks
A guestbook (also guest book, visitor log, visitors' book, visitors' album) is a paper or electronic means for a visitor to acknowledge a visit to a site, physical or web-based, and leave details such as their name, postal or electronic addre ...
,
wiki
A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...
s,
blog
A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...
s,
forums
Forum or The Forum may refer to:
Common uses
*Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States
*Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city
**Roman Forum, most famous example
* Internet forum, discussion board ...
, and other types of
web forms
ASP.NET is a server-side scripting, server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web application, applications a ...
that they can then use to submit bogus content. These often use
OCR technology to bypass
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 de ...
s. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of
target market
A target market, also known as serviceable obtainable market (SOM), is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total m ...
ing or even
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 sophisticate ...
, 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
Webmail (or web-based email) is an email service that can be accessed using a standard web browser. It contrasts with email service accessible through a specialised email client software. Additionally, many internet service providers (ISP) prov ...
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'.
See also
*
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 t ...
*
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, sp ...
*
Dead Internet theory
*
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 li ...
*
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 activiti ...
*
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 ...
*
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 a ...
*
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 ...
References
External links
Botnet discussion mailing list*
BotScout: Anti-bot service dedicated to fighting forum spamSpambot Beware! - information on how to avoid, detect, and harass spambotsBot-trap - A Bad Web-Robot Blocker
{{Spamming
Internet bots
Internet Protocol based network software
Spamming