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A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam.Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. [1] Web hosts and website operators have responded by banning spammers, leading to an ongoing struggle between them and spammers in which spammers find new ways to evade the bans and anti-spam programs, and hosts counteract these methods.
Related titles should be described in Comment spam, while unrelated titles should be moved to Comment spam (disambiguation). Comment spam is a term referencing a broad category of spambot or spammer postings which abuse web-based forms to post unsolicited advertisements as comments on forums, blogs, wikis and online guestbooks.
The simplest method involves spammers purchasing or trading lists of email addresses from other spammers.. Another common method is the use of special software known as "harvesting bots" or "harvesters", which uses spider Web pages, postings on Usenet, mailing list archives, internet forums and other online sources to obtain email addresses from public data.
In June 2009 it was estimated that the Cutwail botnet was the largest botnet in terms of the amount of infected hosts. Security provider MessageLabs estimated that the total size of the botnet was around 1.5 to 2 million individual computers, capable of sending 74 billion spam messages a day, or 51 million every minute, equal to 46.5% of the worldwide spam volume.
A hacker purchases or builds a Trojan and/or exploit kit and uses it to start infecting users' computers, whose payload is a malicious application—the bot. The bot instructs the infected PC to connect to a particular command-and-control (C&C) server. (This allows the botmaster to keep logs of how many bots are active and online.)
Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address. [1] The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked.
Grum relies on two types of control servers for its operation. One type is used to push configuration updates to the infected computers, and the other is used to tell the botnet what spam emails to send. [6] In July 2010, the Grum botnet consisted of an estimated 560,000–840,000 computers infected with the Grum rootkit.
Architecture of a Web crawler. A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (web spidering).