See related story: Covert Crawler Descends on Web
Slideshow: Covert Crawler Descends on Web
A coder unveils a sneaky web crawler capable of acting like a human being, fooling server logs and potentially aiding e-mail-harvesting spammers. Quinn Norton reports from the Shmoo Con hacker conference in Washington, D.C.
Hoffman's program downloads everything that comes with a page -- images, JavaScript and components like ActiveX and Flash -- instead of just hitting the page itself like traditional spiders.Photo: Quinn Norton

