Botnets are a serious threat to internet security. Botnets consist of networked collections of compromised machines called robots or ‘bots’ for short. Bots are also called ‘zombies,’ and botnets are also called ‘zombie armies.’ Bots are controlled by nodes called ‘botmasters’ or ‘botherders.’ Bots are infected with malicious code that performs work on behalf of the botmaster or botherder. Botne...

The blowout time (BOT) is an index for assessing vascular function based on pulse wave analysis using laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG). The BOT in the optic nerve head (ONH) is reportedly correlated with age. The ONH contains various vessels with differing properties, and it is unclear whether aging affects these vessels at similar rates. With the aim of using the BOT for the early detection of ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare the oncologic and reproductive outcomes of patients with borderline ovarian tumours (BOTs) who were treated with cystectomy or unilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (USO). METHODS The medical records of patients with BOTs who were treated between 1997 and 2009 were reviewed retrospectively. The recurrence rates were compared between the USO and cyste...

Web services designed for human users are being abused by computer programs (bots). The bots steal thousands of free email accounts in a minute, participate in online polls to skew results, and irritate people in chat rooms. These real-world issues have recently generated a new research area called Human Interactive Proofs (HIP), whose goal is to defend web services from malicious attacks by di...

Today botnets are still one of the most prevalent and devastating attacking platforms that cyber criminals rely on to launch large scale Internet attacks. Botmasters behind the scenes are becoming more agile and discreet, and some new and sophisticated strategies are adopted to recruit bots and schedule their activities to evade detection more effectively. In this paper, we conduct a measuremen...

We have developed software bots that inhabit the popular online social environment SecondLife (SL). Our bots can wander around, collect data, engage in simple interactions, and carry out simple automated experiments. In this paper we use our bots to study spatial social behavior. We found an indication that SL users display distinct spatial behavior when interacting with other users. In additio...

We propose the use of hierarchical (HTN) planning techniques to encode strategies that one or more Bots should execute while acting in highly dynamic environments such as Unreal Tournament© games. Our approach allows the formulation of a grand strategy but retains the ability of Bots to react to the events in the environment while contributing to the grand strategy.

Resumen Este artı́culo propone un algoritmo evolutivo para optimizar el comportamiento de bots (NPCs) que no requiere de una función de fitness explı́cita, usando en su lugar combates por pares (a modo de “justa”) en los que sólo uno de los contendientes sobrevivirá. Este proceso hará las veces de mecanismo de selección del algoritmo, en el que sólo los ganadores pasarán a la siguiente generación...

The massive spread of fake news has been identified as a major global risk and has been alleged to influence elections and threaten democracies. Communication, cognitive, social, and computer scientists are engaged in efforts to study the complex causes for the viral diffusion of digital misinformation and to develop solutions, while search and social media platforms are beginning to deploy cou...

Shopping bots are automated software applications that allow consumers to easily search for and compare product prices from online retailers. In a previous project, researchers investigated the functionality and performance of e-commerce shopping bots. The purpose of this project is to test the temporal stability of their findings two years later. Both studies concur that no ‘best’ shopping bot...