Researchers have stumbled on another large botnet that’s been hijacking home routers while nobody was paying attention.
Tag Archives: bots
Twitter boots 143K bad apps, throttles developer access to API
Devs now have to register and will be capped at 10 apps, and those apps are now on a diet: no more endless gorging on spam/bot-pestering/etc.
Would a bill banning bots do more harm than good?
According to the bill as it stands now, it would be okay to use a bot as long as it discloses that it is a bot, otherwise it’s “unlawful”.
Names and photos of Venmo ‘drug buyers’ published on Twitter
The bot scraped Venmo’s public API for sex, drugs and alcohol-related words, then tweeted profile photos and first names of the “buyers.”
2 million stolen identities used to make fake net neutrality comments
Most crucially, two of those identities were senators who are now demanding the FCC find out who’s behind the bots and the identity theft.
Google cracks down on election meddling advertisers
Google will now require people or groups purchasing federal election ads to show that they’re US citizens or lawful residents.
Facebook and Twitter may be forced to identify bots
If passed, the bill would give platforms 72 hours to investigate reports of bots seeking to mislead Californians and to remove or disclose them.
Google’s charging for YouTube ads it knows are from bots, researchers say
Google charges advertisers for YouTube ad views in spite of correctly spotting them as being fake views generated by bots – no human eyeballs involved – a group of European researchers have claimed.
Robot tweets “I seriously want to kill people”, prompts police response
When Dutch police responded to a death threat made by a local Twitter account, they discovered the culprit was nothing more than an automated bot.
SSCC 179 – What kind of a name is “Lizard Squad”? [PODCAST]
Here’s the latest episode of our regular security podcast. This week: phishing, spamming, zombification, SCADA and the Internet of Things, and the curiously named cybervandals that go by “Lizard Squad.”