Shmoo Con hacker conference news

Wired posts an interesting story today about an innovative move reported at the Shmoo Con hacker conference in Washington D.C. The story says, "Websites get looked at by two different kinds of visitors: the human ones who peer around, look at the graphics, think about the links and click slowly; and the spiders, those automated scanners that come in from search engines like Google, or, more ominously, from malicious attackers, competing businesses and spammers looking for e-mail addresses. Fortunately, it has always been pretty easy to tell the difference between the two in server logs, and block unwanted or anti-social crawlers. Billy Hoffman, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics unveiled a new, smarter web-crawling application that behaves like a person using a browser, rather than a computer program. Hoffman says, ‘Basically this nullifies any traditional form of forensics.’"

One comment

  1. Well, just what we need. Somebody get that guy a job!

    I was reading Ray Kurzweil’s bok< The Singularity is Near. In it heas remarked offhandedly that we're learning more from the attacks on systems by hackers than what it's costing us in money and trouble. I guess they're out there finding the holes and vulnerabilities in software so we can patch them before somebody really nasty get's in. Well, with friends like that who needs enemies?

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