On Nov 13, 2007 12:00 AM, Roger Chrisman roger@rogerchrisman.com wrote:
Why gibberish?
Hm.. gibberish bots are putting unique -- easily findable once indexed by search engines -- gibberish onto wiki's.
Maybe to phone home that, "Master, I'm alive and ready for work." while avoiding the security risk of actually phoning home.
Bot masters could then know such and such bot is ready for work or for rental or sale without ever being contacted directly.
Maybe that is why bots are marking wikis and forums with unique gibberish.
Just an idea based on what I see -- google this:
racrodr
If that was the unique twitter of your own bot spawn, wouldn't you be thrilled to find it alive and twittering? Your own bot, recorded in Google's index!
Twitter bots.
Roger :-)
So botnets are having their slaves use gibberish postings as a method of phoning home? That's absolutely devious, but it sounds like a logistical nightmare in comparison to current methods: You wouldn't know which gibberish string belongs to which bot unless it had already communicated its identification string to you beforehand, in which case there would be no need to phone home! I'm sure the evil masterminds behind such operations could probably engineer a solution around that issue, but adding gibberish to random wikis still seems like a pretty far-out method of communication in comparison to just identifying through an IRC channel or a Web page or whatever. (The only real benefit I could see to this scheme is that it would be harder to infiltrate or break, which may now be at the top of the botmaster's concerns.)
I'm kind of partial to the NSA spy code theory, myself. :p