It’s amazing how many new tactics these people come up with in order to steal your personal information. There’s a new “bot” that chats with users on Russian online chat rooms (a bot is a program that mimics a real person online). It’s called CyberLover and apparently it’s quite clever in impersonating a human and gets people talking to it.
During a test it was found that the CyberLover chat bot got 10 real people to have conversations with it, in only 30 minutes. During this conversation it tricked people into providing their real names, contact information and photos. This is all private data, provided to the chatbot.
The darker side of this clever piece of software is that the bot is run by hackers intent on committing identity theft. Personal information like this is regularly sold on an online black market, and then used to commit fraud, such as opening credit card accounts in your name. Serious crimes indeed.
CyberLover is an interesting piece because it has different levels of its personality, and they’re mostly of a sexual nature. This type of conversation seems to get people’s attention more easily making it easier to manipulate them into providing personal information (called Social Engineering).
At the moment this is all in Russian however it won’t be long until it appears in other languages including English.