Sith Spam Bots Take a Page from a Star Wars Novel (s)

The December release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latest instalment in the Star Wars saga, already has the internet abuzz with recent trailers, looming figures appearing in posters and spoilers in beer glasses. But, it looks like cyber criminals have caught the Star Wars fever too!

Imperva Incapsula researchers first felt a “disturbance” in mid-October, when several Incapsula customers were bombarded with suspicious WinHTTP POST requests from yet-unidentified bots. The high rate of these requests, in addition to the considerable number of targets, caught Incapsula's attention. Even more so, the similarities between the attacks showed them all to be part of a larger co-ordinated assault.

The content that the bots were stuffing into the comment section of the send-to-a-friend emails piqued the researchers' interest. There, alongside a link or two to a sleazy-looking website offering a selection of gambling apps, the Incapsula researchers found snippets of text that were in fact quotes taken from Star Wars novels, chopped up into incomprehensive chunks and used for the purpose of peddling mobile slots.