Making attacks automatic and personalized
It’s in the hacker’s best interest to automate and personalize attacks so that it becomes possible to attack multiple targets at once, but in a manner that’s designed to improve the chances of success. Security professionals keep putting up new walls to keep hackers at bay, such as the use of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) (http://www.captcha.net/) to make it harder to access a website through automation. Hackers keep coming up with new ways to bypass these protections by relying on automation to do it.
Once a protection is bypassed, the hacker then needs a method of interacting with users or being seen as a perfectly normal member of the computing community, which requires specific information. Harvesting information discretely helps a hacker appear invisible and makes attacks more successful. The following sections describe both of these strategies in a specific...
