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Is there any research on how many botnets use Selenium? I would guess that most of them use something more basic just because it's a lot easier to put together.
by morley 12y ago
Is there any research on how many botnets use Selenium? I would guess that most of them use something more basic just because it's a lot easier to put together.
- opendais 12y agoHow many use Selenium specifically? No. It was just a random example that was intended to not point in an easily weaponized direction. I figured it was both common and known in tech circles that Flash/Javascript executing botnets for ads existed and have for year(s): http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ http://www.spider.io/blog/2013/03/chameleon-botnet/ They were acquired by Google so it isn't just random blog spam: http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/google-acquires-spider-io-to-help-spot-and-stop-online-ad-fraud/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/google-acquires-spider-io-t...
- eli 12y agoMy personal experience with comment/forum spam bot networks is that at least 90% do not understand javascript. The ones that do tend to have extremely realistic traffic patterns and the ability to solve captchas. I suspect those are actually real people with incredibly crappy jobs, not super-intelligent Selenium-powered bots.
- paulgb 12y agoComment/forum spam is different game than botnet ad fraud. The latter executes JavaScript by design since it's often necessary to load the ads.
- acfou 12y agosee the charts from Incapsula in this article which show a third of the bots are not executing javascript https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140623200557-84444-five-separate-vendors-confirm-bot-traffic-in-60-range https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140623200557-8...
- kylequest 12y agoInstalling Selenenium on infected machines is not very stealthy. The new malware usually tries to stay in the kernel to avoid detection. Try stuffing Selenium in the kernel :-)