The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you! 1. Those stealthy botnets - How I found out about a not so new class of botnets 2. The Web is Broken - Certain companies recruit app developers to create botnets by injecting “network sharing” SDKs into their apps. These botnets then use the network bandwidth of unsuspecting users of said apps to crawl the web, brute-force mail servers and other nasty things. So there is a (IMHO) shady market out there that gives app developers on iOS, Android, MacOS and Windows money for including a library into their apps that sells users network bandwidth. Infatica is just one example, there are many more. I am 99% sure that these companies cause what effectively are DDoS attacks by a ... Read full article.