The advertising bots can't hold conversations yet, according to The Wall Street Journal, to ensure they don't damage a brand identity by saying something silly. But last July, it invited brands to set up their own profiles on Kik and approach its users with automated messages too. What’s ironic about all this is that while Kik is trying to bash away sexy chat bots on its service, it’s preparing to invite a whole other set of automated chat bots, from advertisers.įor years, Kik has been running its own experimental chat bot that tells jokes to users and gets around 1.8 million messages a day. Since it’s unusual for criminal groups to share the same conversations with independent code, it suggests that most or all of the reported Kik porn bots are coming form a common origin. McDaid says there are common connections in the wording between all of the above transcripts, from both time frames and all platforms. The line is repeated again four years later on Kik: Note the first line:Ĭool… Well, my name is Janessa Im from S.Florida. Here’s another transcript of a sex chat bot on Yahoo Messenger in February 2010. It’s repeated almost verbatim on Kik more than four years later, based on this screen grab from a wary Twitter user: What's taking u soooo long babe im burnin' in here waiting for u. Take for example, the last line of this transcript of a porn bot hitting an MSN user in January 2010: “These attackers may have many years circumventing and running their bots on a succession of messaging platforms.” “This helps confirm our belief that this is the same code and probably the same group re-using their techniques by moving onto new messaging platforms once they become popular,” McDaid says. McDaid has scoured through the conversations of one of the most common Kik porn bots, and noticed that it re-used the same conversations from another porn bot that was active on MSN in 2010, and potentially on Google's GChat in 2011. The trouble is that bot controllers are not only innovative, they’ve been doing this for years. He wouldn’t go into detail about how Kik detects the bots beyond when they’re reported in by users, but says he has a team of four people tasked specifically with fighting spam on Kik. Hendry also suspects the spammers are located outside the U.S., because the biggest waves of porn bots hit Kik users late at night or early in the morning, rather than during the U.S. It’s definitely not something that goes out, writes the spam code and is done with it.” We’ve seen entire shifts in what a particular spammer seems to be doing. “It’s a limited number of highly-motivated individuals,” says Kik's Hendry. (McDaid bases his analysis on the screenshots that Kik users post on Twitter or forums.) It’s also hard to tell if these are the same porn spammers that have hit Snapchat, Tinder and Skype. He can’t verify if the porn bots are coming from a single group, as McDaid suspects, because Kik doesn’t analyze message content for privacy reasons, so it’s harder to track what messages belong to what sets of users. General spam makes up a low, single-digit percentage of Kik’s message traffic, Hendry says, and based on the different technical signatures they leave behind, he suspects he’s dealing with a small handful of spam groups in total. The Ontario-based startup has been grappling with porn bots for two years now, according to Dan Hendry, who leads Kik’s server team and wages an ongoing digital war on spam. Last May it boosted its privacy controls and blurred the images that users received on their lock screens to counter the problem. Spammers also make money from simple click-throughs they get from links, or from stealing users’ credit card details outright. Even with a 0.5% conversion rate, the attack would have drawn in around $16,000 for the spammers.
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