Bad bots pose a significant threat to our security, yet they are often overlooked and underestimated. These silent attackers, disguised as spam accounts, flood the internet with computer-generated comments. While we may scroll past them without a second thought, the truth is that bad bots are a grave danger, especially for business owners.
What Are Bad Bots?
Bad bots are malicious software applications designed to perform automated tasks with harmful intentions, including brute force attacks, data mining, ad fraud, and other malicious activities. These stealthy attackers serve as the tireless, automated “employees” for cybercriminals, enabling them to cause widespread damage. According to a study by Imperva, these automated bots accounted for 47.4% of all Internet traffic in 2022.
The activities of bad bots can vary from being bothersome to highly destructive. The most prevalent ones that can impact any business are:
Reputation Attacks: Bots have the ability to leave harmful comments, spammy messages, and negative reviews on your social media or website, thereby damaging your reputation and undermining consumer trust.
Web Scraping: Bad bots also have the ability to extract valuable data from your website, such as pricing information or customer reviews. This data can be exploited for different purposes, including undercutting your prices or selling it to your competitors. Additionally, these bots can create duplicate versions of your website and employ phishing scams to deceive visitors.
Industries that handle sensitive data, such as healthcare, are at high risk of data breaches caused by bots. These bots can easily extract confidential information like patient records, medical history and insurance details, which are then sold on the dark web for monetary gain.
Brute Force Attacks: These bots attempt to gain unauthorized access by repeatedly guessing passwords, which leaves your systems vulnerable to breaches. Financial services companies are particularly targeted by this popular tactic. If cybercriminals successfully gain access to accounts holding sensitive financial information, they can proceed to open new credit card accounts.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Bad bots have the potential to initiate DDoS attacks, which can flood your website or online services with excessive traffic, resulting in downtime.
Ad Fraud: Some bots engage in click fraud, repeatedly clicking on online ads to deplete your advertising budget without delivering real human engagement. This can distort analytics and frequently result in misguided decision-making for the marketing department.
Identifying bad bots can be a difficult task as they tend to imitate human behavior. The most challenging ones to detect are evasive bots, which are named so because they can bypass security measures by frequently changing their identities, cycling through random IPs, mimicking human behavior and overcoming CAPTCHA challenges. Despite the complexity of the task, there are a few techniques that can assist in identifying bad bot attacks.
Watch Traffic Patterns: To identify irregularities in website traffic patterns, monitor for instances of unusually high traffic originating from a single IP address or a specific region.
Monitor All Comments Sections: Regularly monitor social media sites for spam comments or fake negative reviews and promptly remove them.
Use CAPTCHA Challenges: To filter out automated traffic automatically, consider implementing CAPTCHA challenges or bot detection tools.
Implement Anomaly Detection: Anomaly detection algorithms can be utilized to identify abnormal activities such as rapid data scraping or suspicious login attempts.
Track Bot Signatures: Maintain a comprehensive list of recognized bot signatures and conduct regular comparisons with incoming traffic.
In case you come across recurring problems, there are several steps you can take to address them. These may include:
Educate Your Team: Train your employees to recognize and report suspicious activities, as they are often the initial defense against potential threats. Develop a comprehensive protocol that outlines the appropriate individuals to notify and the necessary actions to be taken upon identifying and concerning issues.
Use Bot Detection Solutions: Invest in bot detection software or services that can effectively identify and block malicious bot traffic.
Maintain Regular Updates: It is important to regularly update your software and security systems to prevent bots from exploiting any vulnerabilities.
Implement Rate Limiting: To prevent scraping attempts, it is recommended to restrict the number of requests made by an IP address within a specific time frame.
Hire An IT Professional: IT companies have advanced solutions to eliminate the annoying and dangerous issues caused by bots, which they deal with regularly.
The presence of malicious bots can have a substantial impact on business owners resulting in financial losses, damage to reputation and legal complications. If you have concerns about the impact of bad bots on your organization, we offer a complimentary 10-Minute Discovery Call to identify vulnerabilities and provide guidance on safeguarding your company and its operations. Click here to book now.
