Increasing Bot attacks

Nearly 40% of the web traffic is bot traffic and out of this bot traffic, 60% are bad bots. Malicious bots are widely leveraged for malicious purposes such as credential stuffing, DDoS attacks, data theft, price scraping, and unauthorized crawling, among others, costing businesses heftily.

One of the Bots named, Scraper Bots, which is content scraping means Original content is scraped from reputable websites and published elsewhere without permission to hurt SEO rankings. It seems that all digital is fading up and again everything physical is coming up.

Experts say another Tsunami is hitting the world like continued layoff in the social media and the Big Four tech giants Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Meta (Facebook)—with Microsoft are now recognised as FAANG.

With increasing sophistication and lethality, bots are an important addition to the online fraud/ cybercrime arsenal. And prevention of bot attacks is a must to strengthen web application security. Bots are automated scripts that are programmed to run specific automated tasks, usually simple ones, on the internet with minimal human intervention/ supervision.

Higher speed, agility, accuracy, and performance in completing repetitive, routine tasks, in comparison to human executives, have made bots sought-after by businesses for various legitimate purposes. Owing to these very benefits, they are cybercriminals and other bad actors for a wide array of malicious activities.

A report from Indusface says, across 693 websites, 2.1 million bot attacks were blocked on the AppTrana WAF last month. From phishing, spamming, ad frauds, data harvesting to DDoS attacks, account takeovers, and brute force attacks, bad bots are leveraged by attackers to orchestrate a wide range of attacks.

These attacks could cause downtimes, make the website/ application unavailable to legitimate human traffic, enable illegitimate access to critical assets, and/or lead to the loss of sensitive information, among others. Further, bad bots are also used by attackers to illicitly snoop and scan websites for vulnerabilities to exploit. 

The Scraper bots are often deployed by attackers and even competitors to extract copyrighted/ trademarked/ proprietary content from a website and duplicate it elsewhere. This is often done by competitors or adversaries looking to negatively impact your SEO rankings as duplicated content diminishes your site’s authority over that content. Content scraping is also used by attackers to orchestrate phishing attacks and scams. They create fake websites by duplicating scraped content to trick visitors and do their bidding.

With this there is Loss of Customer Trust and Confidence, Bad bots are used by attackers to spam the comments sections with malicious code/ provocative comments/ scathing reviews, inflate views, write false or biased content by creating fake social media accounts, write fake user reviews, and so on. Such activities lead to the loss of customer trust and confidence in your brand and drive customers away from your website. 

Overall, bad bots cause revenue losses to organizations by negatively impacting the bottom line. Further, the attacks caused by bad bots bring massive financial losses, legal bills, penalties, and reputational damage. By mitigating bot threats, you save yourself millions of dollars. 

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO, VARINDIA