   Would you consider a internet bot a "security exploit?"
  Would you consider a bot that acts like a human to be a security exploit if it was being used in chat programs? 
  Nope   "Luck is for people without skill."- Robert (I Want My Island) ;  Bots, behaving like humans, security exploit? I don''t see the link...++Toolmaker.PostCount;   -Earth is 98% full. Please delete anybody you can. ;  neither did i my freind tends to think differntly he finds bots to be huge security exploits.. but he may be a bit deranged. ;  I can see some arguments that could be made, depending on what sort of security exploits you are refering to.  I can''t imagine how it would suddenly allow somebody to haxor your megahurtz, but it could definately be used to take advantage of somebody.  A bot that trolls AIM and gets stupid people to d/l trojans is certainly a bad thing.  So would I say AOL has an obligation, security wise, to try and prevent bots from being used on their services?  Yes.CM ;  If a bot can trick someone into downloading a trojan, they deserve it. ;  Hmmm... Not sure...pouyacat->postcount += --(pouyacat->postcount)++;   [edited by - PouyaCat on February 20, 2004 1:12:21 PM];quote:Original post by od1n  If a bot can trick someone into downloading a trojan, they deserve it.   If that''s the prevailing opinion, then nobody is allowed to bash MS for allowing Outlook to execute attachments.  After all, if the user is stupid enough to execute a trojan, then they deserve what they get.CM ;  I can easily see how a bot could be used to attack a system, though without a copy of the bot to test on with a debugger I doubt an attack could do any worse then crash the bot (like the bot of a certain one programmer that was once used on IT).Simplest scenario is this:Bot is written in C (or badly written in C++).User sends bot very long message.Bot doesn''t have a big enough buffer, overflows, overwrites part of the stack and either crashes when it jumps to some random part of memory or starts executing arbitary commands if it jumps to the part of memory where the buffer is. ;quote:Original post by Conner McCloud  If that''s the prevailing opinion, then nobody is allowed to bash MS for allowing Outlook to execute attachments.  After all, if the user is stupid enough to execute a trojan, then they deserve what they get.Wakeup. Outlook hasn''t let users execute attachments for some time. In fact any recent version/update of Outlook actually removes executable files from zip files too (you get the rest of the files, but the exe is missing). It takes a wizard to registry hack Outlook enough to let you get at an executable attached to an email.Of course most people are stilling using a 6 year old version of Outlook with no updates. If people where still using a 4 year old version of Mozilla''s Email they could be subject to DoS and arbitary code exection attacks simply by connecting to their mail server, let alone all the Mozilla vulnerabilities involved in opening messages or clicking links that have existed. 