I read an article on cnet about a chat bot called ‘CyberLover’ that collects personal data in russian chat rooms. A chat bot is a piece of software that tries to behave like a real person participating in a chat. Normally conversations with these types of bots are quite boring. You can try out one specialized on science  here. There are quite a few bots out there and even Microsoft made it into the headlines with their latest creation.

But CyberLover seems to be very successful. I haven’t seen it in action but the article describes it like this:
It attracts visitors in dating chat rooms and lures them into private conversations where it creates reports of all the data it collects about it’s victim – including shared web cam images and other personal data.

This bot opens  a new door to automated social hacking attack or automated identity theft. And best of all, it has passed the Turing test.

The idea of the Turing test is to test the quality of an A.I. The setting is quite easy. One real person has to chat with a machine and another real person via some text channel. After the two conversations, the person has to distinguish between the machine and the other real person. If he can’t, then the machine passed the test to demonstrate intelligence.

After reading the article about the bot and it’s success one big question raised in my head:
Did the machine really pass the Turing test or did it’s victims fail?

Or maybe the technological singularity is coming…