What is a Bot and How Does it Work?

Many repetitive human tasks have been reduced as technology has advanced. A Bot is one of the outcomes of such advanced technology. Bots are all over the internet, hiding in places you wouldn’t expect to find them. So, what exactly is it, and what does it do?

In this article, we will go over bot in great detail. But, before we go any further, let’s go over the topics that we will cover in this blog:

• What is a bot?
• Types of bot
• How does a bot work?
• Advantages of using a bot
• Disadvantages of using a bot
• Popular bot attacks
• How can you tell if your computer has been infected by a malicious bot?
• How can malicious bot activity be prevented?
• Conclusion

What is a bot?

Bots are a part of almost everyone’s daily life, whether they realize it or not. You will come across bots if you use the internet to buy products, research travel deals, or financial services.

A bot is a software program programmed to perform specific tasks. Bots are automated, which means they operate as per the instructions without involving a human user to initiate them each time. People/Organizations develop many bots to do things that humans usually do, such as repetitive tasks, but much faster.

You can also explore – What is cybersecurity?

Types of bot 

Bots come in various shapes and sizes, each with objectives and tasks. The following are some of the most common:

• Chatbox: A chatbot is an AI program that can mimic a natural language conversation with a user via messaging apps, websites, mobile apps, or phone calls. One of the enormous advantages of chatbots is that, unlike applications, there is no need to download them; they do not require updating and do not consume memory on the phone.
• Shopbots: These are intelligent software agents that automatically search many online stores for a specific product.
• Knowbots: These programs gather knowledge for a user by visiting websites and retrieving information that meets specific criteria.
• Monitoring bots: This program allows a user to monitor a website’s or system’s health.
• Web crawler: Search engines like Google or Bing use this bot to index the content of websites from all over the Internet so that they can appear in search engine results.
• Social bot: A social bot is a computer program that operates on social media platforms. These bots operate partially or fully autonomously and can mimic human users.
• Malicious bots: These are self-propagating malware that infects its host and connects to a centralized server. The control server serves as a bot’s “command and control center.

How does a bot work? 

Bots, especially chatbots, learn from data insights using natural language processing (NLP) and advanced machine learning. Bots typically have a predefined trigger that instructs them to begin working, such as a specific keyword or an event, such as a message sent on social media. Once activated, internet bots communicate with one another via a network.

Bots consist of algorithms that help them perform their assigned tasks. These tasks include conversing with a human, mimicking human behaviors, and gathering content from other websites.

Advantages of using bots 

There are various advantages of using a bot. Some of those advantages are:

• At repetitive tasks, it outperforms humans.
• They are adaptable.
• They serve multiple functions.
• Because there is less involvement of humans, there’s a lower chance of error.
• They can provide a better user experience.
• Unlike humans, bots can be present 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• They are available around the clock.
• They are unquestionably less expensive because they have fewer labor costs.

Disadvantages of using bots

There are some drawbacks of using a bot, such as:

• An attacker can program bots to be malicious.
• An attacker can use bots for spam.
• They can’t communicate beyond a certain point.
• There is still a need for human supervision.
• Bots can sometimes misinterpret users.
• They are capable of making poor decisions.
• Bots can store sensitive data or other relevant information about the user.

Popular bot attacks 

Here are some examples of prevalent bot attacks:

• Account takeover: An attacker use bots consisting of stolen user names and passwords to attack the sign-in page of online accounts such as e-commerce and banks. ATO successful attacks result in security breaches, identity fraud, and bogus purchases.
• Carding: To avoid detection, an attacker uses bots in order to test stolen credit or debit card data on merchant sites with small purchases. Once tiny transactions are successful, and the attacker confirms that the card is valid, the attacker uses that card data to buy gift cards or goods that they can quickly convert to cash.
• Web harvesting: An attacker uses bots to crawl web pages in order to steal prices, curated content, product reviews, and inventory data in order to capture and redirect customers to another website.

How can you tell if your computer has been infected by a malicious bot? 

Various signs can help you to identify whether your system is infected by a malicious bot or not, such as:

• Increase in login failures: Fraudsters typically purchase a list of credentials on the dark web and then implement an army of bots to check these login information on various sites, such as social media or e-commerce sites.
• Increase in fake account creation: An attacker uses bots to create new accounts not associated with real users. Attackers may use these accounts for fraudulent transactions.
• Unusually high pageviews: Some bot attacks will attempt to overload your servers. Whether a DDOS attack or a massive number of scrapers, your analytics software will show an unexplainable pageview spike.
• Increase in gift card validation failures: Attackers use bots to determine which gift cards have large balances so that they can sell them on the dark web.
• Unexpectedly high bounce rate: Bots leave instantly after achieving or seeing that they cannot achieve their goal. But since bots can perform in microseconds rather than seconds, this will result in an unusually high and rapid bounce rate.
• Anomalous geographical traffic: If a surge of web traffic originates in places where you do not reside or where you do take service from, you may be under attack

How can malicious bot activity be prevented?

Every day, bots visit your website; how should you protect yourself? Here are some methods for avoiding malicious bot activity:

Update your windows regularly: To eliminate bot infections, you must always keep your system up to date, such as through automatic windows updates. This will assist you in keeping your device virus-free.

Install anti-virus software: Malicious bots are classified as malware. Malware detection software can assist in automating defense against all this.

Place robots.txt: This file can be placed at the root of your website to specify which bots are permitted to access it. Remember that this is only effective for managing legitimate bot crawl patterns and will not protect against malicious bot activity.

Using challenges to differentiate between human and bot traffic: Utilizing problems that require human involvement or user validation, such as CAPTCHA, can aid in preventing bots from carrying out their intended hacks.

Set up a bot manager: A bot manager is a part of a web app security platform that classifies web requests and allows using some bots while blocking others.

Use CAPTCHA: You should plan your website with a CAPTCHA that users must fill out when signing up, commenting, or downloading forms. Many publishers and websites use CAPTCHA to prevent the download or spam bots from causing harm.

Use a firewall: You can configure firewalls in order to block bots and prevent specific traffic based on IP address or behavior.

You can also explore – What are the Different Types of Firewalls?

Implement strict access controls: Users must provide additional credentials, such as one-time passwords, when using multi-factor authentication (OTP). These can help in preventing bot attacks like credential stuffing.

Password hygiene: Attackers can use bots to brute-force passwords and gain access to user accounts. You can avoid this by using a strong password and changing it frequently.

You can also explore – What is safe browsing & how to turn it on?

Conclusion

Bots are classified as malicious or non-malicious based on their intended use. Mainly, the purpose of the bot is determined by cybercriminals. As a result, we need to be aware of the different types of bots and how they can harm or benefit us!!