Most of the time, we get a bad impression of the phrase “bot.” However, not every bot is malicious. The problem is that malicious bots and benign bots might have traits that are quite similar to one another. As a result, favorable bot traffic is categorized as undesirable and is therefore prohibited.
As bots continue to improve their intelligence, it becomes more difficult for other bots to avoid being blocked. Not only does this generate a great deal of problems for website proprietors who are trying to maintain a healthy performance of their website, but it also causes problems for the community of web scrapers.
In spite of the fact that we have previously discussed what a bot is, we will explore bot behaviors in more detail in this article. We will also discuss how to identify bot traffic and restrict it, as well as how bots may have an impact on organizations.
All traffic that is not generated by humans is referred to as bot traffic. The program is a piece of software that does actions that are automated and repetitive, but it does so at a far quicker rate than is humanly feasible.
The legality of traffic bots is entirely dependent on the manner in which they are used. On the whole, traffic bots that do not violate any laws, rules, or the rights of third parties could not be deemed to be unlawful. This is in contrast to other types of botnets, such as distributed denial of service botnets, which do violate these laws and regulations.
Good Bots
Search Engine Bots,Bots crawl, catalog, and index websites. Such results help Google deliver its services.
Site monitoring bots,will monitor websites for problems including slow loading times and downtimes
Web scraping bots,publicly accessible scraped data may be utilized for research, unlawful ad detection, brand monitoring, and more.
Bad Bots
Spam bots,used for spam. Often to create phony forum, social network, and messaging app accounts. They boost social media presence and post clicks.
DDoS attack bots,some harmful bots take down websites. DDoS assaults frequently provide enough bandwidth for other attacks to get into the network and steal sensitive data via weaker network security layers.
Ad fraud bots,bots automatically click on adverts, stealing advertising revenue.
The bot detection techniques
- Browser fingerprinting—any browser will send your operating system, language, plugins, fonts, hardware, and other data to the website’s servers for identification.
- Browser consistency—checking for prohibited features. Run JavaScript requests to achieve this.
- Inconsistencies in nonlinear mouse movements, quick button and mouse clicks, repeating patterns, average page duration, average requests per page, and similar bot activity are analyzed.
- Popular anti-bot measures like CAPTCHAs require you to enter proper codes or identify things in photos.
- WAFs use rules to protect websites and web applications against SQL injections, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting. WAF rules separate good and harmful bot traffic. WAFs target requests with known attack signatures.
- If your users have accounts on your websites or applications, propose MFA to safeguard their accounts. You’ll rapidly see that many users won’t. It’s too much friction and puts consumers on the hook to defend themselves, limiting MFA’s security potential.