screen scraping as a hacking method?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

I’m engaged in a low stakes hacking war with an unknown party who is messing with one of my java web start applications. The available evidence suggests that the most likely way this hack works is by interpreting the pictures on the screen, and feeding in mouse clicks. This can’t be a simple replay attack - some pretty sophisticated image processing must be involved, and the interpreter has to be coupled with a custom back-end robot. All in all, an improbably sophisticated package for this hack, which is definitely “just for fun” not profit or malice.

My question is what toolkits might be the basis for such a system?

#2

Possibly they have decompiled your code (which is fairly easy) and implemented their own event listener, and fed in mouse clicks using the Robot class. It could be an inside job :stuck_out_tongue:

#3

If it’s a simple color-clicker, it could be SCAR. That’s actually how I got into programming. That being said, Chrislo’s suggestion sounds more likely.

EDIT: CHRISLO’S THE HACKER

#4

Scar is the kind of thing I suspect is in use, but something much more than just scriptable is needed.
I know there are other windows programs, ostensibly intended for testing GUIs, that will remember
and playback sequences of mouse actions.