Busy little bots behind the scenes
A great deal of what goes on with a blog is unseen by the reader. For example, I’ve talked about the amount of spam comments I get, almost all of them blocked by my spam filter. A while back there was a period of a couple of years when spam came in at the rate of about 10,000 a day. Then for some unknown reason it suddenly went down to about 500 a day. That’s quite a jump.
Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why, although I believe there are several layers of filters that operate. Next, I installed a security system that was supposed to improve things, but the main thing it seemed to do was to inform me on a regular basis of the number of attacks the blog had sustained.
“Attacks” are not the same as spam. They’re not necessarily attempts to take over the entire blog by hacking into it, although I’m pretty sure those occur on a regular basis, too. The attacks I’m talking about are another type of behind-the-scenes war, the details of which I’ll skip except to say they’re an attempt by bots (or the people who design bots) to get into part of the blog’s information sources and use them.
Bots are indefatigable—as you might imagine, since they’re not alive. Every now and then I’ll block one through that same security system (I’m being purposely vague here) if I get a notice that it’s been attacking particularly relentlessly. Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine, although there are some from the US (not sure whether they’re really from the US or whether it’s a proxy IP number and location they’re using).
I blocked one a few days ago. Three days later the service reported that in those three days that bot had made approximately 6000 attempts to attack that were blocked. By my hasty calculations, that turns out to be one every one and a half minutes or so, round the clock.
Not all the attack bots are that busy. And I wonder if at a certain point, they are programmed to give up.
[NOTE: I’ll add that, simultaneously with my blocking some of these bots, my spam-comment-per-day rate has gone down to about 50, which is extraordinarily and unprecedentedly low. So, although my goal was not to block spam, it turns out that spam and the attack bots seem to be related.]
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spam, against the bots, against the powers of this dark web and against the spiritual forces of evil in the digital realms.
Russia?
Must be collusion.
> Most of these bots are from places in China and Russia or Ukraine
Yep. I tried opening the ssh port on my machine for a while so I could access it remotely. After a couple of weeks reading the logs of how many attempts were made to get in through that port I closed it up again. I didn’t think it likely that anyone would make it through, but why worry about it? The marginal utility wasn’t worth it.
I’m too lazy to look up the source right now, but not so long ago, I read that bot and anti-bot traffic makes up a substantial part of all internet traffic. They’re not just background noise. Somebody’s paying for it. Does anybody know whether the so-called net neutrality issue would affect bot/antibot traffic? Silly question?
I understand that Neo’s commenters aren’t generally a techie crowd, but there seem to be a few exceptions, so I thought I’d ask.
Then it started creeping back up to about 1500 a day. Again, I have no idea why
yes you do
its an example of punctuated progress in evolution
duh
progress stalls till something is found, then it piles through the opening till the other side finds something, and makes their progress which then makes it moribund
you can see this all over
but why look?
Artfldgr:
What I meant by “I have no idea why” was something far more specific than that.
In other words, I didn’t know and still don’t know what vulnerability the spammers exploited. I have no idea what the actual mechanism was. I would need to know that in order to do anything about it. I certainly have a very general idea why in terms of the basic principle—the spammers changed something or other that got around something or other in the spam blocking system. That happens in living systems and elsewhere, of course.
Clearly this is the evidence we seek tying the Trump Campaign to the Russians in a collusionary sort of way. Right?
You’re nobody ’til some bot-ty loves you.
As a Chief Info Sec Officer, email and its related vectors account for more than half of organizational breaches.
On a personal level, they have even suckered home buyers to wire money (20% down) to a wrong account causing the loss of their current and future home.
This is fascinating, please revisit from time to time. One wonders if targets like you are selected because of your profile and content or if its just everywhere. The disproportionate internet censorship on conservatives reminds me of the notion : it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
For those interested in bot traffic, the article I read is “The Growing Problem of Bots That Fight Online.” This was published in “MIT Technology Review” on Sept. 20, 2016.
The URL is https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602421/the-growing-problem-of-bots-that-fight-online/
The article’s main purpose is to review an interesting paper about bots that fight each other over Wikipedia edits. At what point will robots dominate internet traffic? Will people then be marginal? How will that change laws and regulations governing the internet? Seems like I know less and less.
Here are a couple of excerpts that hint at the volume of bot traffic.
“By some measures, bots account for 49 percent of visits to Web pages and are responsible for over 50 percent of clicks on ads. This impact is set to increase as the number of bots rises exponentially.”
“One group has estimated that in 2009, a quarter of all tweets were generated by bots.”
I recall Neo mentioning spam before, but I didn’t catch or grasp that it was spam comments.
Mark30339’s comment reminds me of:
“In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Orwell
Cornflour’s comment reminds of the moment when Sarah Palin was selected as the VP candidate. I watched the TV coverage for about an hour and then went to the Palin Wiki page. Then I saw that there were 200 accepted edits to that page in the last hour. I assumed those were all human editors, but who knows?