Supreme bots are on the rise, they are increasingly used by companies. Why that rise? And how do you make a chatbot yourself?
What are bots?
A bot or robot is a small program that can automatically perform certain tasks. It is used in search engines to index web pages and also to maintain IRC chat channels. A bot can be very harmless, for example, bots are used by search engines.
Bots became popular last year. Facebook added them to their platform, Microsoft started to work on it and also chat app Telegram offered them. Making a chatbot became easier and easier, so the number of companies with such a service is also growing. But why is a chatbot so useful? And how can you get started with it yourself?
Put very simple a chatbot is a piece of software that can respond to questions from people in a chat program. So a conversation is simulated without talking to a person. Most chatbots can be found inside chat apps, for example Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram.
What it can do differs per chatbot. Some serve as a substitute for customer service. They help you with things you would normally call or email about. There are also chatbots that perform simple tasks for you. For example, you can use a bot to put an appointment in your agenda, make a reservation at a restaurant or in some cases even to buy clothing via a website.
The further we get in the field of technology (especially in the field of machine learning and natural language processing), the more a chatbot will be able to do. And with that they also become more and more interesting.
Why do they appear now?
Chatbots may be popular now, but they’ve been around since the 90s. Consider, for example, the bots on MSN Messenger, which mainly gave incoherent answers. Then they were of little use, in addition to some fun entertainment for children and young people.
Now they are back, mainly because of some of the technological steps we have taken. In June last year I spoke to Remi Zoeten, data scientist. He then said: “We figured out how artificial neural networks can be used to deal with text. So better computer representations have been found for human language. In addition, Wikipedia and other (public) text sources are constantly growing, chatbots can learn from this.”
The word botnet is a contraction of the words ‘robot’ and ‘network’. Cyber criminals use special trojans to hack the security of multiple users’ computers, take control of each computer and integrate all infected machines into a network of ‘bots’ that the criminal can control remotely.
Possible consequences of botnets
Often times, the cybercriminal attempts to infect and control thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of computers, so that the cybercriminal can act as the administrator of a large ‘zombie network’ (or ‘bot network’) through which to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.), carry out a large-scale spam campaign or other types of cyber-attacks. Some importance ways which help you to gain instagram followers on your instagram.
In some cases, cyber criminals create a large network of zombie computers and rent or sell access to this zombie network to other criminals. Spammers can rent or buy a network to run a large-scale spam campaign.
