Good Bot vs Bad Bots

Certain bots have very significant and beneficial roles. For instance, search engines use bots to crawl and interpret webpages in order to index and retrieve content. However, a lot of other bots carry out obnoxious or harmful activities, such as gathering competitive intelligence by scraping content, hoarding inventory, creating fictitious traffic on a website, engaging in DDoS attacks, or using credential stuffing to gain unauthorized access to user accounts.

Furthermore, because bots are always changing, it is more difficult for organizations to prevent malicious bots from operating while enabling helpful bots to carry out their tasks.

How to distinguish between good and bad bots

In the digital realm, bots can serve both beneficial and detrimental purposes. In the figure, both good and bad bots are demonstrated.

Bots that carry out helpful tasks

Among the bots that are helpful to users and websites are the following:

• Search engine crawlers. These automated programs, sometimes referred to as spiders, scan webpages to assist search engines like Google in identifying the kind of content they contain.
• Chatbots. In order to give consumers information, assistance with inquiries, or customer support, these bots mimic human communication.
• Shopping bots. These bots help customers save money by looking for the greatest offers on the internet.
• Monitoring bots. These bots monitor the health of a website and report errors or vulnerabilities they find.

Bots that engage in dishonest or abusive behavior

However, a lot of bots are made to carry out nefarious or fraudulent tasks, like these:

• Credential stuffing bots. These bots repeatedly enter passwords and usernames that have been stolen into website login fields in an effort to grant hackers unauthorized access to user accounts.
• File-sharing bots. These bots monitor a user’s search engine queries and deliver bogus links that allow malevolent actors to install malware on a computer.
• Inventory hoarding or scalping bots. These bots buy, hold, and resell highly sought-after goods for considerably more money than their initial purchase price, such as tickets, sneakers, and limited-edition merchandise.
• Intelligence harvesting bots. These bots search social media, websites, and other online spaces for users’ personal information that could be exploited for phishing schemes.
• Spam bots. By gathering email addresses from websites and sending unsolicited, malicious emails, these bots help spammers spread their message.
• Traffic bots. These automated programs imitate human user behavior in order to artificially increase website traffic or clicks.
• Social media bots. These algorithms generate fictitious profiles on social media networks in order to disseminate false information or grow the number of followers on a specific account.
• Evasive scraper bots. These bots use content theft for nefarious ends.
• Adversarial attack bots. Threat actors can use these bots to carry out cyberattacks like ransomware attacks or to take advantage of software flaws.
• Bot networks. Attackers can use these clusters of thousands or millions of compromised devices to flood a server or website with malicious requests, crashing it or rendering it inaccessible to authorized users. Threats such as automated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks frequently target these networks.

Gray bots: Captured in the midst (alongside you)

Bots actually exist on a spectrum, despite the common misconception that they are either good or bad. Even good bots can cause issues if they ping a website too frequently. In this middle ground, we refer to bots as “gray” bots. Consider the scenario where programs’ APIs are continuously calling your system. By pinging your website constantly, these partner bots have the potential to degrade your site’s performance even if they are providing beneficial services.

Gray bots shouldn’t always be stopped. Rather, make an effort to control them so they don’t impair site functionality or negatively affect user or customer experiences. For instance, you can limit bot access to your website during periods of high human traffic, such as weekends and early evenings.

Repercussions of inadequate bot supervision

If your system is unable to control bot traffic, there may be dire repercussions. The following are possible outcomes of inadequate bot management:

• Unreliable analytics. Site analytics can assist you in making more informed business and marketing decisions, such as modifying the customer journey based on page traffic and choosing which inventory to buy based on product page hits. If bot traffic isn’t eliminated, those choices may become distorted and result in costly errors.
• Loss of revenue from competitive undercutting. You will make fewer sales and receive a lower price per sale if rivals scrape your website and use the information to continuously undercut your prices.
• Inventory hoarding and manipulation. Users who wish to buy a popular item find it frustrating as bots can make purchases faster than humans. During sales events like the holidays, bot operators have the ability to add inventory to carts and leave it there, which hinders sales and directs customers to your competitors.
• Negative impacts on the bottom line. Bots can cost you a lot of money by sending visitors to a competitor’s website, making your sales teams chase erroneous leads, or impeding your security teams’ ability to respond to DDoS attacks and mitigate account takeover attacks.
• Loss of customer trust. Negative online content such as spam emails with malicious links, phony reviews, and phony social media profiles can damage your business’s standing with clients.
• Loss of advertising ROI. Bots that click on your paid search advertisements frequently can be very expensive for you in the search advertising business.

Bot Management Helps Your Business

Detecting bot activity