The researcher warns: Can hijack your computer

They send friend requests, likes, comments and messages. If you have an account on social media, you have certainly come across a so-called porn bot at some time - a fake profile that with promises of, for example, nude pictures want to make you click on their link.

If you click, you will often end up on porn or dating sites that want to fool you with expensive subscriptions. This is shown by SVT Nyheter's survey.

Christopher Kullenberg is a researcher and university lecturer in science theory and often uses data from social media in his research. He is one of the initiators of the Bot Hunting, a project that examined the porn bots on Twitter 2018. He explains that everything points to the porn bots he investigated being used to make money.

- The main purpose of these cures was to drive traffic to pornographic content and dating sites. The Internet is based on the economic logic that if you drive traffic to pages, there are ways to make money from it, for example through advertising revenue, he says.

One risk with the porn bots is that they drive traffic to pages that try to take your credit card number in different ways, says Christopher Kullenberg.

- Usually by attracting a smaller offer where you only pay a penny for something, and then it ends with you withdrawing more and more money from your credit card.

Some sites may also use malicious code to try to hijack your computer. This risk is especially high if you have an old computer that has not been updated for a long time.

- They can steal your personal information, hijack your webcam or spy on you in different ways. But they can also hijack your computer and use it at a later date as one of maybe a thousand other hijacked computers to overload other computers, says Christopher Kullenberg.

The latter is called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, DDoS. For example, it was used in 2016 when several Swedish news sites were suddenly turned off.

Another way for these sites to leverage your computer is to steal its computing power to generate cryptocurrency, such as bitcoins.

- It's like a nice virus. When you visit such a page, it instructs your computer to perform a number of complex calculations. You may notice that the computer starts to hum a lot from the fan. When you shut down the page, the computer becomes silent again.

Who controls the porn cure is unclear. But everything points to the fact that the cures are coordinated from different "command centers". That conclusion was drawn by Christopher Kullenberg and his colleagues in the Bot Hunting when they saw that the behavior of the cures was often identical.

- When you see that 1,000 cures suddenly write the same thing in the course of ten seconds - then you know that they have received instructions from one place, he says.

Controlling thousands of cures from one place can be a problem for the public debate, says Christopher Kullenberg.

- If a fake news spreads, the cures can be an effective way to reinforce this news - to make it look like something is being said by more than it is actually said.