Porn Bots Pose a Big Problem for Kik Messenger

LOS ANGELES—For the past year and a half, pernicious porn bots have reportedly been targeting users of mobile instant messaging app Kik, which is very popular with teens. According to Forbes, the bots use "fake profiles that randomly message the app’s users with enticing, sexual come-ons that lure them onto a dating or cam site, in which they have to pay a fee. Cue thousands of dollars for spammers. Note that these seductive profiles are not real people but algorithmically-controlled chat bots." Unlike most spam, the porn bots are wreaking havoc because of their complexity, including the ability to hold something approximating an IM exchange. Kik’s founder and CEO Ted Livingston says that of all the types of spam out there, porn bots are the most popular. “Their level of sophistication is incredible," he added, noting that they became a "serious problem" for the app 18 months ago. But the sophistication of the porn bots also appears to be improving with time as its creators use a grab bag of tricks to entice people to play along. Adland.tv ran an item on the problem in April. It was posted by databitch, who had already reported a sex spammer to Kik administrators. "Their advice was the usual, how to block people, which I had already done, and that I should have my settings set to ignore new people which I do," she wrote. "It was clear to me that KIK was not going to do anything about the account with the pornographic images. I realize KIK can't police every user, but the response struck me as toothless to the point of making the network vulnerable to sex-spam. "And right I was," she continued. "I just received this message. It looks like it's an official KIK message, but it's not. It advertises a website with KIK in the domain name, and I won't link it because there's only pornography on it. KIK's timid response to the early sex-chatters has made the entire brand of KIK vulnerable to hijack by kik-sexters, and it's very likely that your teenagers or young children are receiving such messages right now. The Spam chat porn bots are now all over KIK, and andrealessi shares a particularly funny example on tumblr." Despite the harsh assessment of Kik's response to the porn bots, or more likely because of it and many others that the company has surely received, Forbes reports that measures have been put into place to deal with the problem. According to the article, "—Now when someone receives a photo from a random Kik user, the image will be blurred by default. "—Kik is making the 'block' button more prominent. "— It’s also boiling each initiated conversation down to one notification, rather than a flood of notifications for every single message." While those measures provide tools Kik users can use to mitigate any potential harm posed by the porn bots, they do not do away with them. Still, despite having called the problem a serious one, Livingston also took the view that it is becoming increasingly difficult to snow ever more sophisticated mobile users, no matter how old they are. “It’s an annoyance, but nothing more than that,” Livingston said of the porn bots. "Still," adds Forbes, "the problem highlights a recurring problem for an app that can scale up quickly because anyone who joins can simply pick a user name, rather than link to others through a cell phone number like WhatsApp." The hope for Kik is that as their efforts to disrupt the porn bots come to fruition, they will move on to some other platform that has not yet added extra protection. According to security firm Adaptive Mobile, the gang behind the porn bots is "one of the most innovative and likely to quickly enter any new messaging system that may not have protection, and which seems close to their target demographic. Apps like Tinder and Snapchat have experienced high-profile bursts encouraging users to come to Kik.” Livingston remains philosophical about the future, telling Forbes that when he reached out to the big boys for advice, they told him, “If you operate a prominent service at a big scale you’re going to deal with this stuff. This is just part of how the open Internet works. We just look at this as part of the game, and a problem that we have to solve.” This story dovetails with a year-long study that revealed a marked rise in the amount of bad bot traffic.