As I mentioned at Gondolend and Mesozoic Outpost, there’s a particularly nasty hack against SMF that’s been going around this month, being propagated by someone who calls themselves “krisbarteo”. There are several threads about these attacks at the SMF support forum, but the main one is here. After joining a forum, this hacker generally uploads an avatar or attachment containing PHP code, which they then use to inject scripts into other parts of the forum to take control of it. When a site contains more than just a forum, krisbarteo often destroys the whole site, and sometimes also uploads viruses or trojans there in order to infect the computer of anyone who tries to repair the damage done to it.

This sort of thing has happened before with forum software, although I think this particular instance of it might be the worst example ever for SMF. But what’s particularly interesting about this round of attacks is something I’ve never encountered before, either related to hacking or anywhere else: nobody at the SMF developer community seems able to tell whether krisbarteo is a human being or a robot. Not even Ferahgo and I can agree about this—she thinks it’s probably a person (or more likely, a group of people), while I think it’s more likely a robot.

The argument in favor of her opinion is just the sophistication of what krisbarteo is capable of. Even the most sophisticated CAPTCHA codes, which are designed specifically to stop bots from registering at forums, aren’t any kind of obstacle to this guy. And as far as the attacks themselves are concerned, he/she/it is remarkably adept at determining the best possible way of destroying a forum, deleting the logs that could preserve records of how the attack was performed, and creating backdoors so they can reinfect the forum if its owner tries to repair it. In most respects, these attacks are on a par with what the best human hackers are able to do.

As for the theory that krisbarteo is a robot, one argument for this idea is the sheer quantity of forums they’ve attacked. A Google search for “krisbarteo” reveals around two hundred thousand forums where this hacker is registered—an increase of thirty thousand since yesterday—what person or group of people has that kind of time? In addition, there’s also the matter of what seems to be krisbarteo’s ulterior motive for these attacks. According to the SMF support thread, after krisbarteo has successfully conquered a forum, the ultimate result is the forum’s remains being plastered with advertisements for Viagra and penis enlargement pills.

This is the first situation I’ve encountered, and possibly the first time in human history, when a well-known individual has managed to make it a complete mystery whether they were a human or a robot. Everybody is so used to spambots nowadays that it’s easy to overlook how significant this is. Science fiction authors have been predicting at least since the 1950s that someday in the future, robots would become so advanced that they were capable of being mistaken for humans. If that’s what krisbarteo is, then what began as science fiction has once again become reality.

If krisbarteo is a robot, what he’s been doing would probably also be the most destructive attack that any robot has ever performed against humans. Since krisbarteo’s method of attack often destroys an entire website rather than just its forum, several companies that relied on their websites for business have lost money as a result of this. Viruses have been doing this sort of thing for over a decade, but while computer viruses mimic real-life viruses in the way they rely on their hosts to be propagated, krisbarteo is more akin to the Terminator: hunting down his victims under his own power, methodically determining the most effective way to destroy each of them, and then moving on to the next target after each attack is finished.

The situation in the SMF developer community this month seems like it could have been the tagline for a cheesy 1950s sci-fi movie or comic book: “In the year two thousand and nine, havoc reigns as a ruthless robot attacks thousands!” Science fiction has often been somewhat prophetic, but krisbarteo’s attacks involve at least one element that I don’t think anyone in the 1950s could have predicted. Who could have guessed that when robots rise up against humanity, the underlying motive would be in order to sell penis enlargement pills?