December 12, 2007: A
scary new intelligence collecting tool has shown up in Russia. The new threat
is a program that can be set loose in chat rooms of dating services, and
convincingly flirt with people, getting them to reveal information about
themselves (that can then be used for identity theft type crimes.) So far, the
CyberLove program only works in Russian, but the rumor in the hacker
underground that this is just beta testing, and that the system will be for
sale in February (in the largely hidden hacker market), just in time for
Valentines Day.
This kind of social
engineering software is nothing new. The first of these programs, "Eliza" was
created in the 1960s, on a dare, to imitate an online therapist. It worked
better than its creators expected. While an experienced software engineer, or
just a good conversationalist, could quickly figure out that Eliza was not a
real person, many people could not.
CyberLove is a lot more
convincing, although converting it to work in other languages (with their
different social rules) or on different types of chat rooms (like those
frequented for military personnel) will require a lot of work, it won't take a
particularly huge effort to do this.
Convincing chat room bots
open up big opportunities for intelligence agencies. With thousands of chat
rooms devoted to Islamic, and other forms of, terrorism, CyberAgent software
could collect a lot more information than is currently being grabbed by just
monitoring these chat rooms. Some believe that U.S. intel agencies have already
developed bots for this purpose, as this technology has been intermittently
developed, and deployed, since Eliza first appeared. CyberLove, however, is the most powerful
program of this type to ever show up.
