Good Bots vs. Bad Bots

"Good bots" as well as "bad bots" keep on resulting in increasing Web-traffic like never earlier; however, the second type of bots are getting more-and-more prominent.

So claims Distil Networks in its 2018 Bad Bot Report released in the current week. Among innumerable requests related to bad bots exist, possible malicious activities which fraudsters, hackers along with competitors control. Bots are as well utilized for carrying out brute-force assaults, rival data mining, account hijacks, downtime, digital ad scams, data theft and online scam.

In its 5th yearly Bad Bot Report, Distil Networks, while elaborating analysis of innumerable
queries related to bad bots during application stage, notes that airlines and gambling companies get adversely affected with incoming traffic of bad bot that are proportionally higher than for other businesses at 43.9% and 53.1% respectively. Meanwhile, ticketing websites, healthcare and e-commerce get adversely affected from extremely advanced bots that aren't so easily detectable. Infosecurity-magazine.com posted this, March 27, 2018.

An aggregate percentage of 83.2 bad bots claim Web-browsers such as Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Chrome are their user representatives, with 10.4% asserting as emerging from the Opera, Safari Mobile as well as Android mobile browsers. Every month, attacks taking over accounts on ordinary websites take place 2-3 times. However, instantly after a hack, such attacks are three times extra, since bot-operators are wary about people using the identical credentials again-and-again on several websites.

Malevolent bots are capable of notably stealing credentials, setting up fake A/Cs for inundating services, cause DOS (denial-of-service), chafe content and prices, carry out bulk payment card fraud, and retain products within shopping carts to give way to 'denial-of-inventory.'

Almost 50% of the total malevolent bot traffic has its source as data-centers within USA. Since traffic originating out of data-centers keeps on growing, largely because of cloud hosting, it's a very good way for masking bot traffic as well as concealing the originator's location.

Good bots are defined to work for obtaining any website's services openly to public. However, they can yet turn out bad and generate mass data of ad clicks, artificially increase impression data, as also raise page rankings of undeserving websites.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/3/2018