Many people who work in or around internet security often wonder why so few people are aware of the massive amount of fraud and abuse perpetrated by bots.  The answer is simple: bots displace blame.

When you get spam email in your inbox, you don’t get mad at the bot who sent it. Instead you get mad at your mail provider, you get mad at the mail service that is the origin (Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, etc) or you just get mad, but it is never directed to the bots.

When advertisers feel that there have been fraudulent clicks or impression of their ads, they don’t blame the bots, they blame the site that hosts their ads.
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A computer is a conduit for a user, either human or a computer program, to communicate to other users, either humans or computer programs. The human can have a reputation, and the computer program can have a reputation (a trojan or virus would have a bad reputation and a search engine bot would have a good one). A computer can have many users and therefore its reputation is actually a fluid concept based on who is using it at the time. This is the underlying flaw with security systems that employ device finger printing for the purpose of creating a reputation for that device (the computer). Read more »

It’s the question everyone wants an answer to: How do we do it? Well, I’ll tell you right now that I am not about to divulge all of our trade secrets, but I am quite happy to tell you the basis for the Pramana Technology of which we are all so proud. Read more »