https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot
A
spambot is an automated
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]
Contents
E-mail spambots
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(March 2011)
Main article:
E-mail address harvesting
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
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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.[1][2] Twitterbots come in various forms. For example, many serve as spam, enticing clicks on promotional links.[3] Others post @replies or automatically "retweet"[4] in response to tweets that include a certain word or phrase. These automatic tweets are often seen as fun or silly.[4][5] Some Twitter users even program Twitterbots to assist themselves with scheduling or reminders.
E-mail blockers
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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
- Temperton, James (31 March 2015). "Tinder Cuts Sexy Spambot Traffic by 90 Percent". Wired. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
External links
Look up
spambot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
