scam mail

Forward your scam mail to this chatbot it will waste their time for you

Technology

Chatbots. They usually use your time in vain, so why does not someone else go in vain instead? better yet: why not have them waste an email scammer’s time.

That’s the premise behind Re: scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe.
Netsafe says Next time you’ll get a spam mail in your inbox, forward to me@rescam.org, and a proxy email address can start replying to the scammer for you, doing it’s terribly utmost to waste their time. you’ll be able to see some sample dialogues within the video on top of or check out an extended back-and-forth below.

It looks infuriatingly effective.

Using chatbots to provide email scammers a taste of their own drugs isn’t that new. And though Netsafe has created a really fancy looking video promo for their bot, the technology behind it’s relatively simple; relying more on pre-programmed conversational misdirects than sophisticated AI.

Really, though, that’s all it takes. Another famous chatbot time-waster is “Lenny,” that is designed to waste telemarketers’ time, and will so without any AI or speech recognition component. Instead, Lenny uses simply sixteen pre-recorded snippets of dialogue, every of that is as vague and ambiguous as possible. Lenny simply waits until there’s a gap in the conversation, then plays one of its bits of dialogue, cycling through all sixteen in varied patterns.

The technique is amazingly effective because the video below shows. (You’ll feel sorry for the caller before long.)

But simply have to wait until the scammers have their own bots. This will be the future of cybersecurity: a lot of bots battling back and forth behind-the-scenes, running interference for us. That is until the bots stop fighting one another and decide to take on their common enemy instead. Let’s hope we can waste their time simply a little longer.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *