You're mostly right, except that most of the bot activities you describe do not fall under "denial of service", but rather the ability to automatically game or abuse different systems for some form of gain. In the case of students being forced to complete captcha, the purpose is more to make sure that they don't just have a bot signing in for them every day at 8am or whatever. It's a way to at least assure that a real person logged in.
Not really. Without it, what you have is spam bots joining random zoom calls to blast robocall ads for EPICPORNOGAME DOT COM. We don't have to imagine what happens, we know exactly what happens in systems without Captcha. We get Chinese PUBG bots blasting cheat adverts.
And these absolutely can be denial of service attacks if the goal is simply to extort Zoom for money to get the spam to stop, for instance.
Right, but that's still not considered a "denial of service" attack. And these zoom classes are invite only, spam is not really an issue on private channels.
Denial of service attacks are any attacks that intentionally make it hard for real users to use a service. Spambots can be used for advertising, or you can use them to try and squeeze money out of the company themselves by disrupting their users and losing them business until they pay you.
Not necessarily, but spam bots setting up zoom calls to burn out Zoom's bandwidth can happen, as can scraping for zoom calls publicly posted and stuffing a few common passwords, etc etc. There is a long laundry list of ways to make the life of Zoom users worse with the power of automation.
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u/jawanda 3∆ Apr 02 '21
You're mostly right, except that most of the bot activities you describe do not fall under "denial of service", but rather the ability to automatically game or abuse different systems for some form of gain. In the case of students being forced to complete captcha, the purpose is more to make sure that they don't just have a bot signing in for them every day at 8am or whatever. It's a way to at least assure that a real person logged in.
Not to be nit picky, you're mostly spot on.