GC downtime (August 26) due to flood of Bots

[John]

All the downtime today was due to bots, specifically AI data scraper bots as far as I can tell but might also be search engine related.

They were sending far too many bots way too fast and it was making GC unusable. Basically caused an unintentional DoS (denial of service) "attack" on GC. So I turned GC off while getting that all sorted out.

The IP addresses were from a major Internet company (hundreds or maybe even thousands of IPs) and were being used by a different major Internet company.

TikTok / Bytedance apparently must be really quite interested in the conversations going on here at GreekChat!

[blueGBI]

Must be due to #bamarush!

[carnation]

Can they be blocked?

[cheerfulgreek]

Is that what happens? The more interesting the site, the more bots that show? I don’t understand what they collect and the importance of what they collect. And then where does what they collect go?

[John]

Originally Posted by carnation

Can they be blocked?

Usually, yes. But not always. Depends on how determined the bot/spider operators are.

I rerouted these particular bots in a way which should minimize their impact on GC. Similar to what I did with the bots from approx 2 weeks ago.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Is that what happens? The more interesting the site, the more bots that show?

Yes, that's pretty much how it goes as far as I know. At least with search engine type bots as search engines want to direct their users to interesting & useful sites.

GoogleBot is a good example of a beneficial bot as that bot indexes sites & helps increase listings in search which might result in more new website visitors.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I don’t understand what they collect and the importance of what they collect.

The bots from Bytedance / TikTok seem to be AI data scraper bots. But might also be search engine related as well.

They might be training AI / artificial intelligence chatbots using conversations that they scrape from forums all throughout the Internet.

Around a decade ago the world entered a new era of AI. Way back in the day one way AI was made was with programmers creating decision trees to determine what to do depending on different scenarios and that would be many levels deep. Modern AI doesn't do that. Instead, modern AI gives the engine, the neural network, as much labeled data as possible which the AI trains on in order to recognize patterns within the data. The AI is trained & tested over and over, repeatedly. Constantly refining, tweaking the neural net while continually improving accuracy. AI recognizing patterns in images is a good example of this type of training.

With GC being text based conversations, AI data scraping on that is likely to be for training AI language models. Basically very sophisticated chatbots. Similar to ChatGPT if you're familiar with that. Huge amounts of data, as much as possible, is used in training these AIs.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

And then where does what they collect go?

My guess is that if used for training AI, the data is refined and is used for training AI now and maybe even in the future. Could be one giant combined dataset of many different online forum discussions that they continually add to & improve. All that data may be used for training AI, but might never actually be seen by anyone other than the AI researchers and/or data engineers working on it.

[cheerfulgreek]

Based on your post, John, it sounds like bots will be the reason for a future AI takeover. I mean, with the information they’re getting, it’s eventually going to be used for AI in everything. That’s the way it reads.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Do you think it can or will get out of control?

Definitely yes to the first question and probably yes to the second.

In some sense, there have been AIs which temporarily got out of control until they were reigned in. That would be some computer viruses. Although they aren't modern AI.

Eventually there will be modern AI based computer viruses, though.

With that in mind, there will be AI trained to hack computers. I'd be really surprised if that hasn't already been accomplished. If it hasn't or at the very least if it isn't being worked on & developed then many people in the computer security side of government (and cyber warfare) need to lose their jobs. Hacking is like solving puzzles... puzzles are games, basically & AI has already mastered many games, so why not hacking. Problem is that if we don't do this what if an enemy does. Train the AI to hack, train the AI to find new vulnerabilities, train the AI to infect, to evade detection, stuff like that and we have a real problem, especially if integrated into a virus.

Then there will be AI trained to protect against AI that is trained to hack. And who knows which side will win that battle.

But it doesn't even need to be an AI designed to do bad things for it to get out of control. Could be a completely well intentioned AI but some aspect of the logic was missed or not protected and the AI determines a solution to whatever problem it is solving is to do something really terrible.

It all seems like science fiction but we probably aren't too far off from having self driving cars that are safer than people driving. AI controlling things that have the potential to do a lot of damage becomes more and more real over time.

[cheerfulgreek]

This is interesting, John. I remember when I was a flight attendant, our airplanes had auto-land, so they could land themselves. I mean, the pilots still had to make a few adjustments, but not many. Human error is what generally causes plane crashes, when they rarely happen. I’m sure the same would be true with self-driving cars and trucks.

I hope a massive cyber attack where it affects how we live never happens. There are so many things we take for granted that can be wiped out by cyber attack from an enemy.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

airplanes had auto-land

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

Human error is what generally causes plane crashes, when they rarely happen. I’m sure the same would be true with self-driving cars and trucks.

My guess is that auto-land is more like an advanced type of cruise control. Although maybe those types of systems have been integrating moderin AI in recent years.

Self driving cars are based on modern AI tech which is quite different in how it functions.

I don't know if self driving cars are yet statistically safer than people driving. But over time I'm fairly sure that self driving AI will approach then eventually surpass the ability of people to drive safely.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I hope a massive cyber attack where it affects how we live never happens.

There have been many, but for the most part were able to be resolved, as far as I know.

One example is the Colonial Pipeline crypto ransomware attack in 2021. That cyber attack had an almost immediate significant impact, but the company was able to resolve fairly quickly. When that pipeline was shut down it impacted most of the US East Coast and several States declared States of Emergency due to it. The day after that cyber attack the company paid $5 million in ransom and luckily the hackers provided the fix after getting their ransom.

There have been many companies and different levels of government that have had to pay ransom to hackers to recover essential systems. I recall reading of a number of companies that went bankrupt after not being able to recover from cyber attacks.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

There are so many things we take for granted that can be wiped out by cyber attack from an enemy.

That's for sure.

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by John

One example is the Colonial Pipeline crypto ransomware attack in 2021. That cyber attack had an almost immediate significant impact, but the company was able to resolve fairly quickly. When that pipeline was shut down it impacted most of the US East Coast and several States declared States of Emergency due to it. The day after that cyber attack the company paid $5 million in ransom and luckily the hackers provided the fix after getting their ransom.

There have been many companies and different levels of government that have had to pay ransom to hackers to recover essential systems. I recall reading of a number of companies that went bankrupt after not being able to recover from cyber attacks..

I remember that. Ok, so I read this post a few days ago and I began to wonder since it’s like nearly impossible to catch these criminals who do this, why don’t they just keep doing it and requiring ransom money? It’s not like they can get caught. I remember when that happened and I wondered the same thing when it happened.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I remember that. Ok, so I read this post a few days ago and I began to wonder since it’s like nearly impossible to catch these criminals who do this,

Around a year ago I watched an interview of a guy who was part of some FBI task force for investigating high profile / most wanted hackers, or something like that. He said that we will never catch them and the only ones who do get caught are usually because they made some sort of tiny mistake. There's a documentary about the silk road hacker who was basically caught this way, made a little mistake.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

why don’t they just keep doing it and requiring ransom money? It’s not like they can get caught. I remember when that happened and I wondered the same thing when it happened.

I read something about this a while back. Seems to be that if the hackers get a reputation for not honoring their ransoms then people / companies / governments will probably stop paying future ransoms.

[John]

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I’m going to look for that documentary. I’d like to really see that.

There may be few documentaries about how they caught the silk road guy. I don't recall if it was something I saw on Netflix or YouTube, probably YouTube. When they finally closed in on him it was in a library, he was surrounded by maybe a half a dozen undercover people. There was suspicion that he had setup a way to immediately lockdown his computer with a key combo or something similar, so they couldn't just approach & arrest him as they needed the evidence on his laptop. They ended having 2 agents posing as a couple sitting nearby, the lady slapped the guy and it got the silk road guy's attention long enough for the other agents to step in a secure his computer / prevent him from hitting the key to lock it down.

There's also an interesting interview by one of the agents involved here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KiO8GRgwDk I haven't watched that entire interview but there are clips floating around. Some parts I did watch included where he talked about only the hackers who make mistakes get caught and/or something about catching the low hanging fruit, but the others have not been caught. Something like that.

There's another hacker story where the guy was caught & in jail, working on his own case. Discovered that the gov used some device to masquerade as a cell phone tower, they drove around something like a 2 square mile area collecting call data from a huge number of people. I think it may have been 100,000+ or so. I may be a little off on these facts as it's been a while since I learned about this stuff. That hacker I believe got off because the gov did that mass data collection, trying to find the hacker, without a warrant or something like that. The hacker or maybe his lawyer just happened to stumble upon the name of the device out of thousands of pages of documents.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

I meant if they continue to do it the same way they’re doing it now. So, honor their ransoms by fixing what they screwed up, after they get ransom money. What I’m saying is why not keep doing what they’re doing repeatedly, keep honoring the ransom, then do it again. It seems like they just get the ransom and stop. Why not keep doing it since it’s very difficult to get caught.

Oh, they do keep doing it, just to other people / other companies, etc. I imagine that there may have even been victims who were hacked like that repeatedly, by different hacker groups.

Originally Posted by AGDee

They continue upping the ante. In the last briefing I attended with someone from the NSA, they were talking about how it has changed. Originally, ransomware just encrypted all the data and then they had you pay to get the decryption key. But people started doing better backups and could just restore their systems so they stopped doing it that way.

Then they began extortion scams- so they'd say to pay the ransom to get your data back AND to prevent them from exposing the data they had on the dark web.

That's really interesting and makes sense. I often wondered how the ransomware groups would strike back if people/companies/governments ever figured out how to secure their ability to recover when they are hit instead of paying the ransom. So now if they can recover or not they are extorted that way.

Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek

So, then this happens all the time? Seems like it. That would make me so mad. They seem like they have an easy job and an easy way of stealing money, literally without getting caught. I wonder why they haven’t gone after any banks, unless they have and it just didn’t reach the news.

I recall learning about some major hacks where the hacker group spent months working on it. No idea how many people may have been involved in each hack or how much total time is put into it, but they do often walk away with millions. My guess is that many of these cases may also involve insiders as well. If a hacker group is going to get millions I imagine they might bribe insiders with huge payments for help gaining some kind of access & pulling off the hacks. Some of those "accidental" clicks on phishing links may not be so accidental.

Originally Posted by AGDee

They go after the banks in different ways. Distributed Denial of Service attacks were rampant in 2019 and 2020, trying to disrupt online banking. A banking security officer was saying that the chief information security offers from the banks/financial industry have a call every morning to discuss attacks they are seeing. They collaborate really well and warn each other so they can better defend it. It's constant though. Job security for people in cyber security- no shortage of work for us, truly.

Way back in the day, approx 2005ish, there was a Wired Magazine article about the larger botnets at the time. They were being used I think against online casinos & banks. The victims were just paying up because the ransome was less money than what the online casinos were losing each day while being offline. I couldn't find that specific article but if anyone is interested just Google "site:wired.com ddos botnet" and a bunch of related articles will be in the search results.

[Cookiez17]

Somewhat related but a massive spam bot actually took over Greek rank, specifically the SMU page. It’s been nuts to see hundreds of pages of the same spam over and over again. I assume it has to be using a program to spam that hard.

[carnation]

We had one about 10 years ago that was Indian astrologer spam. It was awful.

[AGDee]

There are definitely warehouses of people in other countries who are scamming people as their full time jobs. They go to work, catfish people in romance scams, etc. The vast majority of hackers attacking us here are not in this country.