Sunday, December 14, 2003
It's been a very busy week, only not doing any of the usual things.... except in that it was net related.I've been fighting something of a battle in the #england undernet chatroom, only what sets this apart from your typical chatroom fights is that it wasn't against any person or people.
The chatroom, and undernet as a whole has been plagued for the last year or two with spambots, and no-one has been able (or maybe just haven't tried) to stop them.
The thing with these spamming bots that a lot of people don't understand is that they aren't people. They're a hidden program sitting on some unsuspecting person's computer, put there secretly by the very website that the program advertises in the chatroom.
So... the more people who click on the adverts produced by the bots, the more people become infected with the program and start advertising... making a very vicious circle. Where this falls down is, it's a parasitic system. Once the number of bots reaches a certain level, people will no longer tolerate that level of intrusion, and will stop visiting the chatroom(s), which means a loss of income for the owners of the websites being advertised by the bots.
Now where do I fit into all of this?
A large part of why no-one's tried to stop the bots is that they're very hard to spot as they enter the channel. They look like normal chatters, and don't do anything to draw attention to themselves.... and they absolutely NEVER spam ops who can kick them out of the room. So, till recently we've never been able to kick them out till after they've spammed someone and been reported for it.
Until now.
It was pointed out to me a few days ago that if I did a "whois" (technical irc term for looking up certain info about chatters) on all of the people joining the room with a gibberish ident in their hostname, a large proportion of them would have a 5 digit number for a 'real name'. 99% of those are spambots, and its easy to verify that by doing a 'version' check on them... as the bots never respond to this check. A final check, just to be absolutely sure is to message them privately. The bots absolutely never respond.
Armed with this information, I began kicking bots from the chatroom on sight.... though this turned out to be a bigger task than I had realised.
Every time I kicked a bot... usually two or three actually, as they always come in clusters, more would join the room.
Obviously, doing this manually for an extended people just wasn't gonna work, as it was leaving me no time at all for actually chatting, which is what chatrooms are actually there for.
What I began doing was logging all the details of every single bot I spotted. After a couple of days I went over that data looking for trends, set maybe 20 strategic bans in the channel bot, and set up a massive blacklist script on my irc client.
Now any bot trying to enter the channel either gets banned by the channel bot, or kicked by my script. The *very* few that slip through get spotted by me (when I'm watching), kicked out manually and added to the blacklist so they can't come back.
All that remains to be done is to tidy up the list to remove any duplicate entries and distribute it to all the ops who want it... and hey presto... game over... we won :-)
Labels: chatrooms
Steve 6:55 AM [+]
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