Warning! Warning! Danger Will Robinson!
If you are a person that loves to spend time in chat rooms trying to find Mr. or Ms. Right, take note that you might not be talking to a real flesh and blood person on the other end but a cold, calculating smart computer program that could be misused by the unscrupulous to steal important information from you or your hard drive.
There’s a Russian Website called CyberLover.ru that boasts that it can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It makes the claim that it can chat up as many as 10 men or women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers and other personal information, according to Reuters New Service.
The popular security company PC Tools, is warning its customers and the rest of the computer world that this new software can easily be abused by those knowledgable in identity fraud. They can use the benign program to wrench out a person’s personal online data and use it to steal that identity.
The Russian company behind the new software deny it was created or ever intended for identity fraud, but simply as a better tool for online interaction between couples.
Currently it is only available in the Russian language, but is set to go on sale February 15, the day after Valentine’s Day.
“Not a single girl has yet realized that she was communicating with a program!” said the CyberLover.ru website.
While the site can be used to lure both men and women, from the online pitch it is obvious its main target is women.
“It’s happened – a program to tempt girls over the internet!” said the site. “Within half an hour the CyberLover program will introduce you to (fill in the blank)….girls, exchange photos and perhaps even a contact phone number,” it states.
CyberLover’s website says that the settings on its program can be changed to attract men, persuade people to visit a website or encourage them to charge up their mobile telephone credit, and that all the data collected will be stored.
A spokesman for PC Tools said the program had a “terrifyingly well-organized” interaction that could fool users into giving up personal details and could easily be converted to work in other languages.
“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” Sergei Shevchenko, Senior Malware Analyst at PC Tools, said in a statement.
“It employs highly intelligent and customized dialogue to target users of social networking systems.”
He said the program “can monitor Internet browser activity, automatically recognize and fill in the fields in the web pages, generate keystrokes and mouse clicks, and post messages, URLs, files and photos.”
“It can do exactly what users normally do when they are online, only in an automated pre-programmed way.”
The CyberLover.ru site denied the program did anything wrong, saying it only gathered information that chatroom users themselves were volunteering.
“The program can find no more information than the user is prepared to provide,” one of the site’s employees, who gave his name only as Alexander, said in an emailed reply to Reuters questions.
“It maintains a dialogue with a person, but is not engaged in hacking or any other such schemes, I think this should be obvious,” he said.
“If you have someone who is ready to hand over secret information to the person they are chatting to after having known them for all of five minutes, then in that case a leak of information is possible.”
Our advice to anyone remotely considering using this site as a method of hooking up with someone? STAY AWAY!
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