Source: Big Data Digest (ID: BigDataDigest)
Author: Caleb
When the sun shines, the flowers smile at me, the birds say early and early, why are you carrying explosives bags...
Every time I think about going to work and school, I always want to hum this song, especially on holidays, such as Valentine's Day (let me see who is still single, oh it turns out that I am fine).
At this time, if you receive a message in the anonymous chat software or drift bottle, someone will really blow up your school or company tomorrow, and it is estimated that it will be a piece of music.
But students at the private school Berkeley Carroll don't think so.
Last week, a 9th grader received a message on the anonymous chat app Omegle claiming that someone would go to Berkeley Carroll with an assault rifle and a pistol filled with "hundreds of rounds of ammunition", targeting more than 30 people.
Berkeley Carroll's communications department did not immediately comment on the matter, but the relevant person in charge of the school has informed the parents of the situation, "At present we have notified the law enforcement department, they have also arrived at the school and are actively investigating the matter." In addition, security personnel have been added near the school."
Notably, in that anonymous message, the letter writer explicitly stated that Berkeley Carroll was "my school" and ended up listing the names of 11 people.
However, it is not yet possible to confirm the identity of the sender.
Is it actually a robot farm to send an automatic attack of the oolong event?!
Even with a clearer point in the message, Berkeley Carroll isn't the only school threatened.
On Wednesday, Christy Cáceres, principal of Brooklyn Friendship School (BFS), sent an email to parents saying that the school was currently under threat, "In the early hours of the morning, the school's Instagram account received a message that we have reason to suspect that the community is currently under security threat."
Noting, however, also in the letter, Cáceres said the NYPD and FBI believe the information was only part of an automated attack sent by a bot farm.
Not just a simple script, but a complete piece of software, a dedicated infrastructure consisting of servers, data centers, multiple connected computers, routers, and more. A robotic farm uses advanced technical equipment, structure, and coding to generate a large number of invalid clicks.
In 2020, the Ukrainian Security Service discovered a Russian robot farm and confiscated the equipment of the robot farm, including two telecommunications companies, computers, telecommunications hardware, 22,000+ SIM cards, etc. In 2016, Ukraine's cyber police also discovered a similar robot farm, which included more than 4,000 servers located in 63 countries.
Among them, Methbot is the largest and most destructive robot farm ever detected, with servers and data centers located in Dallas and Amsterdam. One server runs multiple sessions of the bot farm, which has about 1200 servers with over 852,991 IP addresses that were generated using fake registration details.
The reason why it is believed that the robot farm is at work is because in the past week, there has been a wave of similar threats across the country. Five public and charter schools in Washington have been evacuated three times after receiving bomb threats. Washington police arrested a 16-year-old suspect on suspicion of involvement in some of these threats.
Fortunately, no explosives have been found anywhere, and no obvious link has been found between security threats in New York and the Washington area.
Let's start with Facebook Robot Farm
In fact, not only anonymous social software, most social networks have the problem of robot farms.
Taking Facebook as an example, from an auditing perspective, these bots are not particularly different from human users. These automated procedures can be used to scrape users' personal information without consent, create influencers, covertly advance agendas, and spread disinformation.
While automated systems can detect more pronounced robot activity, more complex robots can also mimic humans better. Scarily, facebook seems to be trying to normalize the notion that bots are part of internet life by failing to stop bots on the platform.
Last May, a research team led by Bob Diachenko stumbled upon a Facebook robot farm hosted on an unsecured server. The robot farm was used to create and manage 13,775 Facebook accounts, each with an average of 15 posts per month, for a total of 206,625 posts in a given month.
At the same time, robot farms continue to create new robots, but they have been deleted by Facebook's review system, and the number of posts per month has a relatively large difference.
As of press time, Facebook has also blocked only about one-tenth of farm bot accounts, the researchers said.
At first glance, these bot accounts look similar to regular accounts, with more detailed profiles, personal photos, and lists of friends. However, these accounts often join specific groups and post inflammatory content to ensure that more people can see the posts.
A key tool used by robotic farms to mimic human behavior is called Selenium.
Selenium is a versatile toolset that simulates the activities of real users. The Selenium-controlled bot can open and navigate web pages, click buttons and links, enter text, and upload images in a normal web browser.
Selenium can mainly give these bot accounts the task of joining groups and creating posts. The researchers found that bot sessions can mimic a series of user agents from the iPhone to the Chrome browser, and the owner can make the traffic appear to come from a variety of devices.
Selenium can be used through proxies, further allowing bots to mask their origins, and even Selenium can be set to add a delay between clicks. The researchers say even some of the most advanced robotic detection techniques can't distinguish between humans and Selenium.
Nowadays, these bot accounts are affecting our lives at a speed that is visible to the naked eye, this time it is an oolong attack, so what about the next time? Who can guarantee that the story of the sheep herding child will not be truly staged?
Related stories
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxmg4/bot-generated-shooting-threats-are-terrorizing-schools
https://patch.com/new-york/parkslope/berkeley-carroll-threatened-school-shooting-documents-show
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/inside-facebook-bot-farm/
https://www.clickguard.com/blog/bot-farms-and-click-bots-invalid-clicks/