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Hacker = One who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system. In our case we are talking about people who have unlawfully gone onto others accounts and tampered with and or stolen things from others accounts.

*Websters

Spam/Spammer/Spamming = Unsolicited commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses, also repeated sending of unwanted mail to an address

*Websters, and myself

Spambot = E-mail spambots collect e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather e-mail addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations

*Wikipedia.com

Bot/Botter/Botting = Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.

Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links.

There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:

~Spambots that harvest email addresses from contact forms or guestbook pages

~Downloader programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire web sites

~Web site scrapers that grab the content of web sites and re-use it without permission on automatically generated doorway pages

~Viruses and worms

~DDoS attacks

~Botnets / zombie computers; etc.

~File-name modifiers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. These change the names of files (often containing malware) to match user search queries.

~Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets. Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites, like TicketMaster.com. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public from also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.

~Bots are often used in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to farm for resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to obtain; this is a concern for most online in-game economies.

*Wikipedia.com