June 3, 2014  By Jean Taggart 

 

I recently had a strange contact request show up on Skype. I mainly use this messaging platform for work, and I was puzzled, as I did not recognize the name of the requester.

I performed a quick web investigation on the name of the account, as well as contacted a co-worker to see if this was simply someone new at work trying to connect with me via Skype.

All results were negative, but this strange unknown person piqued my curiosity.  This is the very social engineering angle that such a request plays upon, as once you accept the request, you will be engaged in a discussion with a chatbot.

Chatbots have been around for ages and I have many fond memories of random IRC users stumbling on a channel I used to hang out in, and attempting to strike up a conversation with our custom Eggdrop chatbot, as we had chosen a feminine name for it. It had accumulated a large custom vocabulary and you could have a decent, if somewhat erratic, conversation with it.

 

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Quite an interesting article and chat to a chatbot/scam merchant.