Spambot

Screenshot of a website login page using a CAPTCHA defense against the creation of accounts by bots

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]

E-mail spambots

E-mail spambots harvest e-mail addresses from material found on the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather e-mail addresses from websites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations. Because e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail addresses from character strings that appear to be munged, or instead can render the text into a web browser and then scrape it for e-mail addresses. Alternative transparent techniques include displaying all or part of the e-mail 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.

Forum spambots

Main article: forum spam

Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums, and other types of web forms that it 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 hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.

This category of spambot has gained considerable notoriety since November 2006, with the introduction of XRumer, a forum and wiki spambot which can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.

One way to prevent spambots from creating automated posts is to require the poster to confirm their intention to post via e-mail. Since most spambot scripts use a fake e-mail 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.

Twitter spambots

Main article: Twitterbot

A Twitterbot is a program used to produce automated posts on the Twitter microblogging service, or to automatically follow Twitter users.[3][4] Twitterbots come in various forms. For example, many serve as spam, enticing clicks on promotional links.[5] Others post @replies or automatically "retweet"[6] in response to tweets that include a certain word or phrase. These automatic tweets are often seen as fun or silly.[6][7] Some Twitter users even program Twitterbots to assist themselves with scheduling or reminders.[8]

E-mail blockers

Main article: Mail filter

The term spambot sometimes has an inverse meaning, referring to a program designed to prevent spam from reaching the subscribers of an Internet service provider (ISP). Such programs are more often called e-mail blockers or filters.

Blocking software may inadvertently prevent a legitimate e-mail message from reaching a subscriber. This can be prevented by allowing each subscriber to generate a whitelist, a list of specific e-mail addresses the blocker should let pass.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Tinder Is Being Taken Over by Spambots Posing as Humans". news.com.au. 21 January 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  2. ↑ Temperton, James (31 March 2015). "Tinder Cuts Sexy Spambot Traffic by 90 Percent". Wired. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
  3. ↑ Jason Kincaid (January 22, 2010). "All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love". TechCrunch. Retrieved May 31, 2012.
  4. ↑ Kashmir Hill (August 9, 2012). "The Invasion of the Twitter Bots". Forbes. Retrieved December 28, 2012.
  5. ↑ Dubbin, Rob. "The Rise of Twitter Bots". The New Yorker. Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  6. 1 2 Martin Bryant (August 11, 2009). "12 weird and wonderful Twitter Retweet Bots". TNW. Retrieved August 1, 2014.
  7. ↑ Christine Erickson (July 22, 2012). "Don't Block These 10 Hilarious Twitter Bots". Mashable. Retrieved December 28, 2012.
  8. ↑ David Daw (October 23, 2011). "10 Twitter Bot Services to Simplify Your Life". PCWorld. Retrieved May 31, 2012.

External links

Look up spambot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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