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."
Council is leading the witness... (Score:5, Interesting)
Aside from all of the fun with malicious code and all, the potential to lead people down a mental path through 'conversation' seems to have the potential to expose a LOT of people to make self-incriminating statements
It's like a photo-radar gun for thought crime, an investigator doesn't even have to be there to do it. Just set your bots out there to lead people into talking about laundering money, seducing teens, killing their neighbor and WHAMO an adventurous district attorney is pressing charges.
Nah, what was I thinking, we live in way to free of a society for that to ever happen. What a relief
And what's new? (Score:5, Interesting)
I did something similar for a friend, helping him pick up women on IRC. The bot learned his usual questions and if they answered about 10 questions, it meant they were interested in him and the bot would forward the conversation to him and he continued it. Another time, I wrote an IRC bot for myself; it would act as a man-in-the-middle to pick up women by getting female nicknames and then forwarding the messages it got to other female-like nicknames it detected. If the conversation went long enough, it forwarded everything to me and I would pick up the chat from there.
Interesting concept (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen this idea used for pranks before. People hanging out on IRC watching a bot that was hooking up unsuspecting AIM users to each other. Later on, this became a website called Omegle.
Re:In other words. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really. Unless I'm missing something you would effectively be having a conversation with a real person. The only difference is that it is being relayed through a bot which may or may not alter the text - and even if it does alter the text the general gist would still be the same. If you were having a conversation with a person would you click the links they send you? Or would you say "I can't click that link because I can't verify your identity and trustworthiness"? It's definitely devious but I don't think the results are that surprising.
Also they are surprised that people clicked tinyurl links more than myspace links but... that just shows that people would rather look at anything than a myspace page.
Re:In other words. (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, if you are having a conversation with someone you know, and at one point in conversation he says: "BTW a good covering of the subject can be found at http://tinyurl.com/foo" and the bot changes the text to "BTW a good covering of the subject can be found at http://tinyurl.com/bar" you have little chance to notice before you click on it that a bot-in-the-middle changed the link.
Of course, I have preview enabled in tinyurl, so I'd see the real URL before I go there, and even if I couldn't recognize the real URL as obviously wrong, NoScript would likely protect me from any malware on that site (and the fact that I'm using Linux would protect me further, since the malware is most likely Windows specific anyway).