There is one extremely common threat to our security. Nearly everyone has witnessed it, but hardly anyone talks about it – bad bots. These silent attackers are often thought of as annoying spam accounts posting computer-generated comments online. They are so common that most of us tend to scroll by them without noticing. In reality, bad bots are much more dangerous. This is especially true for business owners.
Bad bots are software applications. They are programmed to run automated tasks with malicious intent. Examples include brute force attacks, data mining, and ad fraud. These stealthy assailants are the tireless, automated “employees” of cybercriminals that help them wreak havoc at scale. And they are everywhere. A study by Imperva revealed that of all Internet traffic in 2022, 47.4% was made up of these automated bots.
Reputation Attacks: Bots can leave comments on your social media or website with malicious codes and links. They can post provocative or spammy comments and leave scathing reviews. These actions affect consumer trust.
Web Scraping: Bad bots can scrape your website for valuable data. This data includes pricing information or customer reviews. They might use it for various purposes. These purposes include undercutting your prices or selling your data to competitors. They could also use it to duplicate your website and set up phishing scams to trick visitors.
This can be particularly dangerous for industries with sensitive data, like health care. Bots can scrape sensitive health information. This includes patient records, medical history, and insurance information. These details are often sold on the dark web for profit.
Brute Force Attacks: These bots try to gain unauthorized access to your systems. They do this by repeatedly guessing passwords. This tactic makes your accounts vulnerable to breaches. This is a popular tactic against financial services companies. If cybercriminals get access to accounts that contain sensitive financial information, they can open up new credit card accounts.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Bad bots can launch DDoS attacks. They overwhelm your website or online services with traffic. This causes downtime.
Ad Fraud: Some bots engage in click fraud. They repeatedly click on online ads to deplete your advertising budget. This does not deliver real human engagement. This will skew analytics and often lead to poor decision-making for the marketing department.
Detecting bad bots can be challenging since they often mimic human behavior. The hardest ones to identify are evasive bots. They get their name from their ability to sidestep security by cycling through random IPs and rapidly changing their identities. Evasive bots mimic human behavior and defeat CAPTCHA challenges. However, there are a few methods to help you identify bad bot attacks:
Watch Traffic Patterns: Monitor website traffic patterns for irregularities. Look for high traffic from a single IP address. Another indicator is a spike from a single region.
Monitor All Comments Sections: Regularly check social media sites for spam comments. Identify any fake bad reviews and delete them.
Use CAPTCHA Challenges: Implement CAPTCHA challenges or bot detection tools to filter out automated traffic automatically.
Implement Anomaly Detection: Use anomaly detection algorithms to spot unusual behavior, like rapid data scraping or suspicious login attempts.
Track Bot Signatures: Maintain a list of known bot signatures and compare incoming traffic against it.
If you notice repeated issues, there are a few actions you can take, such as:
Educate Your Team: Train your employees to recognize suspicious activities. Encourage them to report these activities. Humans are often the first line of defense. Create a process that includes who to notify and what steps to take when each issue is noticed.
Use Bot Detection Solutions: Invest in bot detection software or services that can help identify and block bad bot traffic.
Maintain Regular Updates: Keep your software and security systems updated to patch vulnerabilities that bots may exploit.
Implement Rate Limiting: Limit the number of requests an IP address can make. This restriction is within a given time frame. The goal is to thwart scraping attempts.
Hire An IT Professional: Bots are tricky. IT companies handle them regularly. They have advanced solutions that can help eliminate these annoying and dangerous issues for you.
The impact of bad bots on business owners can be significant. They can lead to financial losses, reputational damage, and legal complications. If you’re worried about bad bots causing a problem for your organization, schedule a FREE 15-Minute Discovery Call. We’ll help figure out where your company is vulnerable. We’ll also show you how you can protect yourself and your business today. Click here to book now.
To make sure you’re properly protected, get a FREE, no-obligation Cybersecurity Risk Assessment. During this assessment, we’ll review your entire system so you know exactly if and where you’re vulnerable to an attack.
Schedule your assessment with one of our senior advisors by calling us at (252) 329-1382, press 3 or going to https://dtinetworks.com/discovery-call/.
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