Attack of the Fembots

 

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Posted on 12 Feb 2010 at 17:18

In the run-up to Valentine's Day, no one could blame lonely singles for turning to MSN for a bit of companionship. However, there are plenty of people who're more than happy to exploit these needy souls, using automated chat bots that the mainstream press has referred to as "fembots".

Far from being the loyal (albeit slightly sinister) feminised robot companions that might at first be conjured up by the term, these flirtatious chatbots are out to steal your money and infect you with some nasty viruses. So, maybe not that different to trying to find love down at the local meat market, but at least the online version is easier to get rid of.

According to anti-malware firm PC Tools, a type of malware known as a Flirt Bot is on the rise again. These bots use chat rooms to contact random users of chat services like Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger (still commonly referred to as MSN) with an innocuous opener like "How's it going?". Once it's got your trust, the bot will direct you to a website where you'll be promised saucy pictures, videos or other unspecified fun. These sites will often encourage you to enter credit card details and personal information and may attempt to infect your PC via a drive-by download.

According to PC Tools, the current wave of flirt bots use a series of configurable "dialogue scenarios" with pre-set questions and discussion topics. The bot's conversational gambits aren't smooth enough to pass a serious Turing test, but we've seen chat conversations between real people that aren't too dissimilar to the chat log that PC Tools has shared with us.

We suspect that "Mary", the flirt bot's intended victim, is a probably a PC Tools employee, if only because few people who didn't work in the AV industry would ever say something like "wow this is a botnet, crazy!!". The bot in their transcript was using the name "ernestineholom553@hotmail.com" but we were sadly unable to reach her for either comment or more red-hot chat. We have, however, included PC Tools' log of the encounter on the next page.