Researchers Create Social Engineering IRC Bot 66
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology developed an IRC bot that acts as a 'man in the middle' between two unsuspecting users, modifies URLs passed between them, and also is capable of steering the conversation. Not only does this work surprisingly well on IRC — they found a 76.1% click rate for potentially malicious URLs — but four out of 10 people on Facebook Chat also clicked on links after the bot introduced complete strangers to each other. This would have worked even better if the bot were to clone existing friends' profiles and submit friend requests from those, say researchers."
In other words. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, over 7 out of 10 IRC users and 4 out of 10 Facebook users are utter idiots.
Re:In other words. (Score:4, Insightful)
even if one is not, a small unsuspecting moment is enough to get caught.
Re:In other words. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not so certain about that. IRC users tend to be more technically competent than people that just use Facebook or e-mail. How many of these people had Firefox with NoScript, for example? Malicious links would've been virtually worthless in such a case.
Merely clicking doesn't prove much without giving out more information, imo.