This week, an attack by robots crippled a local business. The destruction made it impossible for customers to enter the attraction-based establishment. What’s worse, the robots systematically replaced revenue-generating advertisements with very inappropriate ones.
The business was forced to shut down while it fixed the wreckage and replaced the ads. Only time will tell if the business can regain the confidence of its customers.
The robots were never found and their reckless creators were never identified.
This is a true story.
When we think about robots, we think about logic controlling actuators, wheels, and such in the physical world. In the aforementioned attack, the robots exist in cyberspace and caused very real damage in the physical world–in the form of lost time and money.
Robot Central was shut down earlier this week by a ‘bot (or a swarm of them) that indirectly biased the ads that appear on the site by injecting a mass of hidden links in a key file. It did this by exploiting a bug in the blogging software Robot Central used. The links caused the advertising server (Google) to interpret the web site as one that sells pharmaceutical products. The injection also caused the site’s functionality to break. Meanwhile, other ‘bots were (and still seem to be) posting bogus “reactions” to Robot Central’s topics on Technorati, a blog indexing and feedback site. Each of the reactions contains a collection of keywords that also appear to impact the ad server.
Our website’s log indicated that at least part of the attack came from Amsterdam and Australia. There were tens of thousands of failed attempts to post comments on the site which very likely contained the same kind of garbage being posted within the Technorati responses.
These ‘bots were designed to force certain kinds of advertisements to appear on Robot Central, presumably to push certain products being sold by an interested party. This kind of action, combined with the broken site, both impacts revenue and undermines the credibility Robot Central is trying to build.
As the internet continues to permeate our daily lives through our cell phones, cars, cameras, and televisions, it creates a bigger medium within which robots are free to roam. What makes this risky is that the skills and intelligence required to build dangerous robots in cyberspace are very low. If one knows how to parse HTML, he can write a ‘bot like the one that attacked Robot Central.
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Image referenced from Yahoo Movies.
Ray,
Glad to see you’re back up and running. It’s always a angering (and sometimes scary) thing when bozos like that mess with a perfectly good website.
Keep up the good work.