In This Article We Learn How to Block Bots From Coming to Your Website
• What are bots
• Types of bots
• Malicious bot
• How to block malicious bots
What are the Bots
Bot is a short form for ROBOT, also known as internet bot or web bot. A bot is a software application that is programmed to perform certain automated tasks. Now when we say automated it means they are designed in such a manner that they do not need human instructions to perform. Usually, bots perform simple and repetitive tasks with a much faster speed than a human could.
Most of the traffic on the internet is bot traffic only, they imitate the human behavior and actions, they crawl on the website, scan the web pages, chatting with humans. Bots, normally operate over a network and can communicate with each other.
Types of bots
There are different types of bots like chat bot, web crawlers, social bots, search engine bots and are termed as Good Bots. Good bots are quite useful and make the tasks easier and then there are BAD Bots. Bad bots are the malicious bots that are programmed to intrude in the user accounts, steal the information and misuse it. Malicious bots are a threat to the user data and this data breach may lead to financial loss, data integrity loss and regulatory breaches as well.
Different bots are:
• Chat Bots: A chat bot is a software programmed to simulate the conversation with human being. Automated chats on the websites of banks, hospitals and various customer services are the examples of Chatbots. Amazon’s Alexa, apple’s Siri are some arrays of high-powered bots.
• Web-crawler: A web crawler, also known as Spider, is the most omnipresent bot that is programmed to scan the content of the web pages for search engine indexes.
• Social bots: they perform automated tasks like promoting specific ideas or brand or product on social media platform.
• Malicious bots: as the name suggests these are the automated program intending to cause harm. These are generally used by the hackers to cause Spam, stealing sensitive data and information, content duplication, DDOS etc.
Apart from above mentioned bots we have Transactional bots, Entertainment bots, informational bots, monitoring bots etc
Malicious bots:-
It is a malware program designed to infect the host and carry out cybercrimes
Some statics show that approximately 18 to 20 computers get infected by a malware bot every second.
Common threats by malicious bots are:
• DDOS OR DOS attacks: Bots are used to overwhelm the website by bot traffic which results in slowing down or stopping the service for legitimate user.
• Credential stuffing: Hackers can break into the site and use bots to fill in the login form by stuffing credential by testing all combination of account and passwords to hijack customer’s account
• Scraper attacks: In scraper attacks,Bots can be used to steal the information from third party site and this information and content can be used by the competitor in business and these bots never breach the system. These scraper attacks are the big threat for the business models.
• Inventory denial attack: In this type of bot attack, the bots pretend to be a normal shopper n add the items to the cart from the online store, but they never complete the transaction process and when a validate shopper visits the website the item will be shown out of stock.
• Other malicious bots attacks include spam content, brute force password cracking, email id harvesting and click frauds
How to block malicious bots?
There are different methods and approaches which not only help us in differentiating good bots and bad bots but also, we can differentiate between a legitimate user and a malicious bot.
1. CAPTCHA is one of the methods to prevent bot entering your website. CAPTCHA stands for completely automated public turing test to tell computer and humans apart.it is used in many sites and help in preventing bots from doing logins, submitting forms etc. but somehow this method is not user friendly as well as it is not that efficient.
2. Optimize the traffic and investigate if there is a sudden spike in the traffic on your website.
3. Always check your API’s and other connection which could the area of vulnerability of malicious bot.
4. Always check the source of the traffic on your site.
5. Block all the sources of bad bots and protect every access point from where bad bot can access.
6. Always check the vulnerabilities like outdated apps or open access points.
7. Take support from Bot management service and Bot mitigation Software like Data Dome, Click GUARD, Cloudflare, Radware Bot manger etc.
Conclusion
Bots are software programs that runs automated tasks for the user which saves a lot of time and efforts but sometimes,bots are used to infect the system and steal the information. Malicious bots can be used for spying, hacking and spamming. You can block the bot entering you website by monitoring all the activities on your website closely and taking care of all vulnerabilities which can give an opportunity to intruder.
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