BOTS A GROWING MENACE

7 September 2007

Mainstream press claims that bots are increasing...and so are the dangers


The American mainstream newspaper USA Today reports that millions of compromised computers remotely controlled by crooks, otherwise known as (ro)bots, are increasingly the agents for various forms of fraud, including money laundering.

The newspaper interviewed RSA senior researcher Uriel Maimon, who says that over the past five months there has been a spike in the use of bots on gaming sites with the intention of moving money. The newspaper claims that $200 000 to $300 000 is being moved monthly - a reflection of a crackdown on online gambling financial transactions through UIGEA.

The prevalence of bots is apparently increasing."Bot nets are the BlackBerrys of the fraud world," says Maimon. "You can't do anything without them." According to Maimon, one-in-20 to one-in-50 PCs worldwide are bots. A year ago, it was one-in-200 to one-in-500.

The report goes on to describe how the gambling scam is carried out, using fraudulently obtained credit card details. An element of the scam is often flooding the poker operations of small-to-midsized websites with "players" in the form of bots. These are compromised PCs loaded with poker-playing programs that play poker, but not necessarily well. A human in cahoots with the crook then enters the same room as the bots to compete against sub par competition. The odds are heavily in favour of the human, who wins the pot. The money from the losers is transferred to the winner - in this case, the fraudster.

The article claims that cybercrooks are going to such elaborate measures because it is difficult to transfer the money of a legitimate credit card account overseas. And there are still online payment processors that process online wagers despite the recent and highly publicised crackdown on Neteller.

"Money launderers are going to extra steps to move money because of the federal law," says John Pescatore, a security analyst at Gartner. "You have to get more creative to move money overseas. This is another way to cash out."

While large, established poker sites are good at electronically scanning for bots and for players who intentionally lose to a "designated" winner, small sites are not, Joseph Kelly, a professor who specialises in online gambling issues at SUNY College Buffalo told USA Today.

One Canadian poker player told the newspaper that bot players were frequently encountered, "If you suspect you're playing a bot, you send an (instant message) and attempt to chat with them. They usually don't reply, but some are programmed to respond, "I do not chat," she said.

Online Casino News courtesy of InfoPowa