Challenges in Distinguishing Good Bots from Bad Bots
/
Running a business in the digital age requires companies to create, update, and maintain an online presence. Beyond just being active on social media, every business is responsible for its own website, often acting as the digital point of connection that connects customers to a company.
When monitoring the cyber security defenses of a website, organizations need to understand how to identify and prevent bad bots from impacting their site performance. Bot protection starts from an educational standpoint, with a comprehensive understanding of the differences between good and bad bots helping companies to keep their site and its customers safe.
Let’s explore the various bots that you’ll come into contact with on the internet and how to create an effective bot defense plan.
The Many Types of Bots
When businesses think of online bots, the first thought that comes to mind is typically malicious bots. Especially with the rising number of DDoS attacks over the past few years, people are more aware than ever before of the dangers that botted traffic can present to their business.
Yet, while bad bots are indeed a problem, bots, in general, aren’t always in the wrong. In fact, there are several types of internet bots that aren’t only useful, but vital to the functioning of your business.
Here are some of the good types of bots you may come across:
● Monitoring Bots: Bots that sit on your website or other digital presence and monitor core website performance metrics. Your data about uptime, user movements on your site, and load speed all come from monitoring bots.
● Search Engine Bots: When you create a website, it doesn’t just automatically appear on the web. On the contrary, it must first be crawled by a search engine bot. This bot documents what’s on your site and then indexes it accordingly on search engines. Without this bot, no one could find your website.
● Social Media Bots: Especially if you’ve been in a marketing team, you know that a lot of social media posting doesn’t happen in real time. For larger organizations, social media marketing calendars are created, approved, and scheduled for posting weeks or even months ahead of time. Social media bots help companies post on time and schedule uploads for the future.
But of course, for as many good bots there are, there are an equal number of bots that negatively impact your business. Here are some bad bots to keep an eye out for:
● DDoS Traffic Bots: DDoS traffic is when a hacker uses a botnet of 1000s of compromised devices. They active these devices concurrently, pointing all that traffic to a target site to reduce its performance and overwhelm its servers. This is one of the most harmful forms of bots around.
● Web Scrapers: While web scraping can be a good thing, many hackers use this form of bot to harvest as much digital content as possible. A hacker could scrape an entire site in order to make a hyper-realistic fake site. These bots work well in tandem with phishing tactics to trick consumers into giving away their details.
● Brute Force Entry Bots: Another common form of bot is one that attempts as many times as is needed to forcibly break into a user account. If you align a brute force bot to breached account and password records, it could use previous passwords of yours in other accounts to try and find an entry into your system.
While there are numerous bad bots out there, many of which could have dangerous consequences for your business, preventing all bot traffic simply won’t work. As there are good bots, you’d be limiting your business and reducing its digital footprint.
With that in mind, businesses need to learn how to tell the difference between good and bad bots.
Bot Identification Is Challenging
The main problem with distinguishing good bots from bad bots is that many of the main signatures that bots exhibit are the same across both good and bad. Equally, as malicious actors understand the signature a bot may leave, they constantly work to create bots that fly under the radar.
Over the past few years, in accordance with the rise of artificial intelligence, bots are now becoming highly effective tools. While the individual control that a hacker had over each bot was fairly limited a few years ago, this now couldn’t be further from the truth. Bad bots can even copy human-like behavior, taking small pauses before clicking on parts of the website or scrolling up and down a page to pretend that it's reading.
To begin to identify and prevent bad bots, your company needs to collect as much information as possible on every instance that enters your site. Beyond just IP addresses, you should aim to look at behavior, user agent strings, and other IT signatures. When looking to establish a high degree of security against bots, a company’s main line of protection should be looking toward state-of-the-art bot detection tools.
Protecting Against Malicious Bots
Partnering with a robust bot management solution that understands and recognizes the unique patterns that bad bots exhibit is vital for keeping your business safe. While it’s impossible to block every single type of botted traffic, these security tools will help identify bad bots and then block their signatures.
As a business scales, it’s only going to become a more lucrative target for hackers. By investing in effective cyber defenses as early as possible, you ensure your company stays safe from botted traffic.