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Written by Pedram Hayati
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Thursday, 11 February 2010 10:31 |
Along with its Web applications, Web 2.0 provides a collaboration platform for flexible web content management. Spam 2.0 has existed since Web 2.0 concepts have appeared online. Spammers misuse/use this functionality to distribute spam content.
The act of spamming can be done through two channels: manual and automated. The former is by using human operation efforts like hiring cheap labour to manually distribute spam content. The latter is by exploiting software or scripts which can be in form of client-side software or Web robots. Web or Internet robots perform as programming scripts or automated agents that are designed for specific tasks such as crawling the webpages, checking URLs validity etc without human’s interaction.
Unfortunately, web robots can be exploited for malicious activities such as testing web server against vulnerabilities, harvesting email addresses from webpages, as well as performing Denial-of-Service attacks (DOS). Recently, some web robots have been used for distributing spam content on web applications through posting promotional comments, placing ads in online forums, submitting links through trackbacks etc. We call this type of web robots as spambots. Spambots can be designed to be application specific targeting specific web applications like Wordpress blogging tools, phpBB, Mediawiki etc. or website specific infecting websites like Amazon, MySpace, Facebook etc.
Spambots can be coded once and used many times. They can crawl the web or discover new victims via search engines, register new user accounts and submit spam content. They can reside on different machines e.g. infected user computers to free hosting sites to commercial web hostings.
The above discussion highlights the importance of spambot detection as a possible way to eliminate spam 2.0 Hayati, Chai, Potdar and Talevski (2009).
It should be noted that Web spambots are different from spambots which are designed to harvest email address from webpages. For the sake of simplicity here we refer to web spambot as spambot.
References- Hayati, P., Chai, K., Potdar, V. & Talevski, A (2009). HoneySpam 2.0: Profiling Web Spambot Behaviour. In. Principles of Practice in Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 09) : Springer.
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