Two Minute Technology: Internet Bots

 

Two Minute Technology: Internet Bots

An Internet bot - or 'bot' - is short for robot. A bot is a software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks; such as chatting with users, lurking on webpages, or attempting to break into user accounts. Bots typically imitate human user behavior, but because they are automated, they operate much faster than human users. They can also carry out useful functions, such as customer service or indexing search engines. Unfortunately, they can also come in forms of malware - software used to cause damage to a computer, server, or network.

Internet bots can also be referred to as crawlers, web bots, or spiders.

Bots are essentially digital tools that can be used for both good and bad. Good bots carry out useful tasks and are often used by organizations or individuals to replace repetitive tasks that a human would otherwise have to do. Bad bots - or malware bots - are used for hacking, spamming, spying, interrupting and compromising websites of various sizes, data theft, scams, or DDoS attacks.

Types of Bots

Some bots communicate with users of Internet-based services, like instant messaging (IM) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). IRCs are essentially discussion channels open to more than two users. Many of us already know that the Internet is full of bots. Bots are very common on social media platforms, such as Twitter.

  • Chatbots: simulate human conversation by responding to certain phrases with programmed responses.
  • Social bots: operate on social media and are used to generate messages, act as a follower of users, and create fake accounts to gain followers themselves. Fake accounts are becoming harder for social bots to create due to social networks becoming more sophisticated at detecting fake accounts.
  • Shop bots: shop around online to find the best prices on products for a user.
  • Spider bots (web crawlers): scan content on webpages on the Internet to help search engines understand how to best answer users' search queries. Spiders download HTML, and other resources like CSS, JavaScript, and images to use in order to process site content.
  • Web scraping crawlers: read data from websites with the goal of saving them offline and reuse later. Some websites allow scraping, but there are some cases where scraping is illegitimate and could be in violation of website terms of use.
  • Knowbots: collect knowledge for users by visiting websites to retrieve information.
  • Monitoring bots: monitor the health of a website or system. These bots listen in on chatrooms to ensure community guidelines are being followed. For example, censoring profanity.
  • Transactional bots: complete transactions on behalf of people.
  • Download bots: automatically download software or mobile apps. Download bots can also be used to attack download sites by creating fake downloads as a DoS attack.
  • Ticketing bots: purchase tickets to events, with the aim of reselling those tickets for a profit. This is illegal in most countries and is a nuisance to consumers, legitimate ticket sellers and event organizers.

Web servers have put in efforts to restrict bots in various ways. Some servers may have a robots.txt file that contains rules governing bot behavior on that particular server. Any bot that does not follow the rules could be denied access and/or removed from the website.

Beware of Malware Bots

Malware bots are malicious and can be programmed to break into user accounts, send spam, and scan the internet for personal information. Botnets - a bot network - can be used to distribute these malicious bots, while disguising the source of the attack traffic. Another way bots can infect your computer is via downloads. That is why it is important not to click on images, videos or links that you find suspicious.

Malicious bots can easily go unnoticed, as they easily can hide themselves with file names and processes identical to regular systems files or processes on your computer. They also include the potential threat for carrying out data and identity theft, keylogging sensitive information (i.e. passwords, bank details and addresses) and phishing (giving scammers access to your device, accounts and other personal information).

  • Spambots: harvest email addresses, and post promotional content in comment sections to drive traffic to specific websites.
  • Malicious chatterbots: pretend to be a person, emulates human interaction with the goal of obtaining personal information.
  • File-sharing bots: take users' queries and responds to them with a file for download or link that can infect the user's device.
  • Credential stuffing: bots that "stuff" usernames and passwords (often sourced from data breaches) into online log-in pages to gain unauthorized access to user accounts.
  • DoS or DDoS bots: generates excessive traffic to intentionally overwhelm a server's resources and prevent normal operations.
  • Denial of inventory attacks: targets online shops to list their products as 'not available.' Bots add items to their shopping cart, never completing the transaction. In return, a legitimate customer wanting to purchase an item would receive an 'out-of-stock' message, even though the item might actually be in stock.
  • Vulnerability scanners: scan millions of sites for vulnerabilities and reports them back to their programmer. This allows hackers to hack websites or sell this information to other cybercriminals.
  • Click fraud bots: produce a large amount of traffic aimed at paid ads to commit ad fraud.
  • Traffic monitoring: overloads mail servers or carries out large-scale data theft.

Cybercriminals use bots to steal financial and personal information, to extort money from victims, and to attack legitimate web services and organizations through DoS and DDos attacks that flood their servers or networks with crushing volumes of traffic that eventually leads to their service or network shutting down.

How Do Bots Work?

Bots are made from sets of algorithms which help them carry out their tasks. There are different types of bots that are designed to do a wide variety of different tasks. For example, chatbots may be based on one of the three methods of operations:

  • Rule-based chatbot: interacts with people by giving pre-defined prompts for the individual to select from.
  • Intellectually-independent chatbot: uses machine learning to learn from human text inputs as well as looking for known keywords.
  • AI chatbots: use a combination of rule-based and intellectually-independent operations. In addition to using pattern matching, natural language processing and natural language generation tools.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Bots

Here is a general list of advantages of Internet and computer bots:

  • Faster than humans at repetitive tasks
  • Save time for customers
  • Reduce labor costs for organizations
  • Available 24/7
  • Customizable and are multi-purpose
  • Offer improved user experience
  • Can reach large numbers of people

Here is a general list of disadvantages of Internet and computer bots:

  • Can be used for spam
  • Can be programmed to be malicious
  • Cannot be set to perform exact tasks - risk of misunderstanding the user and causing a frustrating user experience
  • People still need to manage bots, occasional maintenance

Internet and computer bots can be helpful, but some can be harmful. Protect yourself by taking the time to protect your devices from botnet attacks. This can be as simple as installing anti-malware software, keeping all software up to date, only clicking on trusted links, using strong passwords, installing a firewall, and avoiding untrustworthy websites and ads.

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