A votebot is a
software automation built to fraudulently participate in
online poll
An open-access poll is a type of opinion poll in which a nonprobability sample of participants self-select into participation. The term includes call-in, mail-in, and some online polls.
The most common examples of open-access polls ask people t ...
s,
election
An election is a formal group decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy has opera ...
s, and to
upvote and downvote on
social media
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social medi ...
.
Simple votebots are easy to code and deploy, yet they are often effective against many polls online, as the developer of the poll software must take this kind of attack into account and do extra work to defend against it.
Technique used
The
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
uses the
HTTP protocol
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...
to transfer information. Votebots are designed to imitate legitimate user behaviour, such as voting in an online poll by interacting with the server hosting the poll using the HTTP protocol. The bot thus emulates the behavior of a human using a
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
, but can repeat this emulated behavior many times, thus casting many votes.
Distinguishing bots from humans
In many voting projects, developers try to distinguish bots from legitimate users. For example, some websites restrict the number of votes one IP address can make in a time period. Votebots frequently bypass this rule by using proxy or VPN IP addresses. Other web sites analyze the account created by a votebot and its history of actions in the system to identify potential votebots. Votebots in turn counter this by trying to simulate human activity such as logging in and out before voting. Other sites employ
CAPTCHA
A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human.
The term was coined in 2003 b ...
s, which votebots farm out to
Mechanical Turk
The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (german: Schachtürke, ; hu, A Török), was a fraudulent chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it wa ...
s.
Targeted sites
YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
,
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...
,
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
and
Reddit
Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, imag ...
are major target of votebots.
Many small, temporary voting projects are also targeted. Many people try to program or buy malicious scripts to vote for themselves in some processes, and it is hard to count the number of attacks happening every day.
See also
*
Chatterbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behav ...
*
IRC bot
409px, An IRC bot performing a simple task.An IRC bot is a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to Internet Relay Chat as a client, and so appears to other IRC users as another user. An IRC bot differs from a regular client in th ...
*
Knowbot
*
Spambot
A spambot is a computer program designed to assist in the sending of spam. Spambots usually create accounts and send spam messages with them. Web hosts and website operators have responded by banning spammers, leading to an ongoing struggle betw ...
References
{{Reflist
Internet bots
Internet Protocol based network software