Anatomy of a spambot
Credit to Author: John Brandon| Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 03:00:00 -0700
For security pros, spambots are known enemies. For the uninitiated, they are unknown entities. And yet they proliferate like ants at a picnic or teens on messaging apps. You might be receiving countless messages from bots every day, and even worse, a bot might be sending out unwanted emails from your computer right now, making you an unwilling participant in digitized mayhem.
As with any unknown, it can be helpful to understand how spambots work, what they do, how they proliferate and what you can do to protect yourself from being coerced into running one of them.
Before you understand how a spambot infects your computer and how it works, it’s worth exploring how they come into existence in the first place.
Thomas Pore, director of IT and services at Plixer, a malware detection company, told Computerworld some of the gory details. It usually starts when hackers, many of them overseas, in places such as Russia and China, purchase a database of email addresses on the dark web.
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