Researchers develop “HoneyBot”, Social Engineer IRC Users automatically
Friday, June 11th, 2010Researchers of the TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology, Austria) achieved a stunning – and at the same time scary – 76,1% click rate on possibly malicious links in conversations that took place on IRC using an automated social-engineering software dubbed “HoneyBot”.
Their new approach to automated social engineering (“ASE”) does not rely on artificial conversations from an AI but instead used the bot to relay messages between humans, effectively avoiding detection according to what is commonly referred to as “Turing Test” in which humans assess if they can tell apart that they are talking to a human or a computer program of sorts. Previous generations of such bots used an AI called “Artificial Intelligence Markup” to engage in conversations with a much lower success rate: Users where able to spot 80% of the bots after exchanging only 3 messages with them.
