Do You Have (Bad) Bots? 4 Ways To Spot Malicious Bot Activity On Your Site

The likelihood of malicious bots visiting your website is high. Could it be that you can identify them and track them down to mitigate the attempts they are making to steal data and hijack user IDs?

The Internet bot, also known as an Internet-based software application, is a device for automating tasks over the Internet. The functions performed by bots are generally simple and they are performed at a much higher rate than what is accomplished by humans on the internet. There are some bots that are not scams. For instance, ProxyCrawl is a program that enables Google to crawl the Internet and index it to conduct searches. Other bots are malicious, such as those used to scan websites to identify software vulnerabilities and execute simple attack patterns.

The good news is that bots behave differently from humans. Moreover, the same is true if a bot takes over a user’s browser and is piggybacking on a human’s activities.

Various types of bots are available on the Internet, both legitimate and malicious. Below are several common examples.

As an example, if you have a lot of pages on your website, you can place a robots.txt file in the root of your web server, and specify what parts of your site should be crawled how frequently, and which parts will not be crawled.

A scraper is a piece of software that reads data from a website to save it offline and make it reusable. You might be able to do this by scraping the entire content of web pages or by scraping the content of web pages to obtain specific data points, such as the names and prices of products on e-commerce sites.

Scraping the web is a gray area; it is legitimate in some cases, and in some cases, website owners may even permit scraping. There are other instances in which bot operators violate terms of use on a website, or worse still, they may steal sensitive or copyrighted content by scraping the website.

Spambots gather email addresses from the Internet in order to send spam. To collect emails, spambots often use websites, social media websites, business and organization websites, which leverage the distinct format of email addresses.

When attackers have accumulated an extensive list of email addresses, they are not only able to send spam to them, but they can also use them for other nefarious purposes.

The use of bots in social media networks is widespread. According to estimates, between 9-15% of Twitter accounts are social bots.

Social bots are a type of program that can propagate specific ideas among groups of people. The Internet is an essential place for forming public opinion, even though social bots are not strictly regulated. The use of social bots is similar to that of social media accounts (although this becomes more difficult with the sophistication of social media), amplifies the operator’s message, and generates fake followers and likes.

Identifying and mitigating social bots may prove challenging since they can exhibit very similar behaviors to real users.

 It is possible to use them to influence download stats in several ways, such as gaining more downloads on popular app stores and helping new apps move up the rankings.

A ticketing bot is a computer program that automatically purchases tickets to a popular event to resell those tickets for a profit later on.Although this activity is illegal in many countries, it would still be problematic for ticket sellers, event organizers, and consumers if it were not. A ticketing bot is usually sophisticated, emulating the same type of behavior as a human buyer. According to some estimates, automated bots are responsible for purchasing 40%-95% of tickets.

You can check out the following four simple indicators that your site might be under attack by malicious bots:

An ATO attack typically uses botnets, which gain access to your users’ accounts by attempting combinations of usernames and passwords available on other sites. As part of a similar attack, a botnet validates millions of reports per day.  You can easily create reports that provide information about the spikes in login attempts over time based on information from Google Analytics and your access logs using tools like Google Analytics.

Besides stealing the value of gift cards, another popular target for fraudsters is to steal the value of legitimate gift cards. The companies do not ask for the name of the account, the address of the billing address, or any other personal identification information from the account holders when they try to hijack a gift card balance. This makes gift cards an appealing target for fraudsters. The vulnerability of gift cards makes them a prime candidate for brute-force attacks that search for good pairs of card numbers and pin codes by running through combinations rapidly.

Bots controlled by fraudsters usually carry out this type of attack. When gift card validation failures suddenly trend up or spike suddenly, this is a good indicator that the bots are trying to steal your customers’ gift cards from them and sell the cards and pins on the dark web.

Human customers most likely will navigate to a home page, search for what they are looking for, click on a product page, and then check out.Human visitors are unlikely to visit the majority of product pages on your website.This is why scraper bots do this because they only care about the product pages on your website.In addition, those bots may also visit the search page numerous times during a session. Sessions that display strange patterns of page views, such as a large number of searches, are likely to be the result of a bot attack. During irregularly long sessions during which the scraper is downloading large volumes of content, this is another sign of a scraper bot.

In a situation where you have most of your customers living in a specific geographical location — Europe or the U.S. –, and you suddenly see a spike in traffic coming from countries where you do not provide service — such as Vietnam or Chile — then you may be the victim of a bot attack. There are many instances where bot operators can take advantage of cheap hosting services or compromised hosting services or host malware-infected servers and run their bots on those servers. Check the coordinates of your visitors to see if they are bots or party crashers who aren’t browsing or shopping.

However, these are only rough indications that there are bots at work.You should be aware that sophisticated malicious bots, such as those that generate a realistic, user-like signature may appear in your web analytics.

Despite not being stupid, bots are not considered humans. When you look carefully for signs of abnormal behavior, you should almost always be able to discern the difference between them. The best way to monitor the traffic generated by the bot is to use a bot management solution, which provides you with a comprehensive overview.