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Bots fail to live up to Turing Test - again
News Artificial Intelligence (AI) 'bots' still have a lot of evolving to do before they can successfully impersonate human behaviour in a chatroom, according to the results of this year's Loebner Prize Contest in AI.
[October 22, 2003, 14:35]
Bots snarl sites as shoppers seek PlayStation 2
News So-called shopping bots, programs that repeatedly log on to Web sites to help people search for prices or products, have contributed to some recently stalled or crashed Web stores. I like the bots; they scream consumer empowerment," said Forrester...
[December 8, 2000, 11:54]
New generation of shopping 'bots swarms in
News Shopping "bots" and recommendation engines may be a boon to online bargain shoppers, but they can be a bane to merchants fighting eroding profit margins. So much so, in fact, that some merchants have barred the automated systems, which crawl the...
[August 16, 1999, 13:27]
Chat 'bots' may be hacker tool
News The traffic surge relates to an increase in the use of IRC bots by the file-sharing community to swap files and pirated software across the Internet. An international network monitoring group has alerted corporate Australia to a growing file...
[May 10, 2002, 10:55]
Encrypted bots could be the next threat
News In the near future, bots will include encryption to hide their presence from security and network sniffing tools often used to detect them, said Adam Meyers, an information assurance engineer at SRA International speaking at the Computer Security...
[November 15, 2005, 9:55]
New bots a shopper's best friend
News Instead, their bots accompany you around the Net and suggest alternatives when you're ready to buy. DealPilot and Dash.com both launched browser-based shopping "bots" last week, and iChoose is developing a plug-in that will go live later this month.
[November 12, 1999, 9:48]
News Burst: Shopping bots, intelligent at last
News DealPilot, as the company is now known, will launch its DealPilot Express service, a browser plug-in that lets users check competing prices -- complete with shipping, taxes and any duties -- at the click of a button.
[November 1, 1999, 7:37]
HP puts bots in the boardroom
News Why travel on business when you can send your robot double? That's the idea behind Hewlett-Packard Laboratories' "travel robot". A team made up mostly of former Compaq Computer researchers has built the gadget that allows a distant colleague to be...
[May 27, 2003, 8:30]
Buzzing bots behave like bees
News Swarming robots that can act in concert and mimic the behaviour of bees have netted James McLurkin, a 30-year-old doctoral candidate in computer science, the annual Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. McLurkin's robots are programmed to cluster, disperse...
[February 27, 2003, 10:06]
Spammers use free porn to bypass Hotmail protection
News Spammers are bypassing a security protection that is designed to stop automated bots from automatically opening Web mail accounts, by offering humans access to free porn. But because of the sheer quantity of emails that are sent, spammers require...
[May 6, 2004, 18:00]
Bot herders go low key
News Malicious makers of bots are finding big is not always better when it comes to avoiding detection, according to a security expert. Over the past two years, the average network of bots, or compromised PCs commandeered by remote attackers, has...
[November 18, 2005, 10:10]
China leads Asia in malicious online activity
News According to Symantec's biannual internet security threat report released on Wednesday, China topped the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, in malicious activity, producing the most malicious code, spam zombies, bots and attacks between 1...
[September 20, 2007, 8:25]
'Fast-flux' domains help botnets evade capture
News That's largely due to an increased use of methods people use to obscure the domain by constantly mapping to different bots within the network, according to a recently released study. Fast-flux' is a term to describe how the botnets use constant...
[October 9, 2008, 10:03]
Websense reveals bait for Web 2.0 cybercrooks
News The company uses a series of web bots and user accounts, collectively referred to as "HoneyJax", to mimic Web 2.0 user activity. Automated "active HoneyJax" bots solicit users to join networks or reply to requests, and work in a similar way to web...
[August 8, 2007, 10:01]
Hybrid DDoS worm strikes Microsoft SQL Server
News US-based security company SecurityFocus noticed a rapidly growing network of controlled agents known as bots on Tuesday, which reportedly increased by 600 percent in the space of six hours. The bots were being used to launch DDoS attacks on systems...
[November 23, 2001, 13:38]
MSN Messenger used for viral gang warfare
News Jamz Yaneza, senior virus researcher at Trend Micro's antivirus labs division, said that the worms spread by sending messages that contain Internet links to malicious bots. Once downloaded, the bots allow an attacker to take full control of the...
[March 8, 2005, 8:30]
Broadband boom makes UK worst for hacked PCs
News Symantec wasn't able to say how many bots it discovered in total during the period, or how many were based in the UK. Although the UK has more bots, the United States was found to be the top source of such malicious attacks, followed by China and...
[March 21, 2005, 12:10]
Businesses targeted by small botnets
News Based upon Damballa's observations of some 600 different botnets encountered and examined within global enterprise businesses over three months, we found that botnets [with fewer than 100 bots] account for 57 percent of all botnets," Ollmann said.
[September 30, 2009, 17:27]
Sophos warns against antivirus dependence
News Viruses that give hackers access to compromised computers, otherwise known as bots, were a hidden problem, he explained. But bots are running under the radar. Security vendor Sophos has warned companies not to rely on antivirus software to protect...
[September 9, 2005, 17:25]
Government sees silver lining in botnet cloud
News Ward pointed to recent Symantec research that found that the UK contains more 'bots' - PCs that have been taken over by a malicious hacker and used to relay spam and take parts in denial-of-service attacks - than any other country.
[November 21, 2005, 14:05]
