The Omegle Bots, Vulnerabilities, And The ‘Creating Criminals’ Controversy

Omegle is one of the more unique sites on the internet mainly because it enables users to chat unanimously, via text and video. Delving a bit on how it works, users are paired randomly and in some cases according to similarity in subject interests. They are designated as “You” and “Stranger” or “Stranger 1,” “Stranger 2.”

Founded in March, 2009, by Leif K-Brooks, Omegle quickly grew in popularity, and by April, it was getting more than 150,000 page views a day. Fast forward to the present, and the site is plagued with numerous problems, many of which are common across similar platforms, but many others unique to it. First is the issue of Omegle bots created by unscrupulous users to simulate conversations. The problem has discouraged many from using the site.

Although a capture solution has been implemented to curb the Omegle bots issue, it has not been successful. Just to get a glimpse of how serious the problem is, the following is an excerpt of a subreddit used to discuss the problem.

“I went on [Omegle] tonight and literally haven’t gotten a real person after 20 conversations, and it’s the same bot every single time:

“You’re now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

“Stranger: hey

“Stranger: are you a boy?

“Stranger: im female. i want a boy to chat with.

“Stranger: u could just kik me at: vgscaa

“Stranger: that is my kik username. please dont make me wait. that is really boring.”

That said, there were also vulnerabilities on the site recently brought to light by Indrajeet Bhuyan, a renowned cyber researcher from Guwahati who has found numerous bugs on popular social networking sites such as Whatsapp. Just last year, he was able to find a flaw in the Indian banking system that enabled hackers to see anyone’s transaction history and bank balance.

He was invited to the Asian Ground Zero Summit, one of the continent’s premier security conferences, as a result. Back to Omegle, the 18-year-old was able to figure out how it saved conversations, and the specific location in their server. The following is how he came about the issue, as he revealed while speaking to Softpedia.

“I focused on Omegle because it is the most popular anonymous chat service available on the internet and is quiet [sic] popular too. The service randomly pairs you in one-on-one chat window where you can chat anonymously over text or webcam. Millions of people visit the site daily.

“‘In this site, there is no login form or any authentication due to which people often think they are 100% secure. I wanted to see if they are really secured or not,’ the researcher said. These days every other site maintain logs, even most of the VPN sites too maintain logs. […] I was quite sure that they [Omegle] maintain a log too.”

He also talked about the bombardment from bots on the site that were sending misleading links to advertisements. It was the links that provided the clues as they did not self-destruct, which meant they were still stored in the server. Using a Python script, he was able to get screenshots of chats, which were in the PNG format, a technique that could easily be used by malicious persons.

Bhuyan also found another problem with Omegle – it had no contact details, something which made it very hard for users to directly report bugs to administrators. He, however, expressed his hope that the news will reach the staff in due time.

Away from the bots, Omegle has also come under fire for not doing enough to deter pedophiles. And just recently, one user, Zach Sweers, attempted to take matters into his own hands by posing as a teenage girl and then filming people he thought were predators when meeting at designated locations. He regularly posted the clips on his YouTube channel titled “Anxiety War,” which currently has about 200,000 subscribers.

However, all has not gone well as Zach is now being sued by the alleged pedophiles for intentionally entrapping them to make false claims. This is as reported by the Daily Beast. The case is still ongoing, but it seems a lot is working against him as he is being accused of “creating criminals.” The Omegle bots, on the other hand, are still a problem.

[Featured Image by Maxuser/iStock]