The Risk of Bad Bots

A bad bot is a type of bot that has been programmed to perform a number of malicious jobs. They tend to work in an evasive manner, typically being used by cybercriminals, fraudsters, and nefarious parties that are engaged in illegal and immoral activities.

A lot of businesses do not realize just how severe the threat of a bad bot is. Not only could your security be compromised but bad bots can impact your profits, reputation, and the future of your business.

Below, we will help you to understand the real threat of bad bots and the consequences they can have, as well as the ways you can protect your business from this.

With everyone shopping, working, and living online these days, online traffic is surging. However, it is not only made up of legitimate users. Nearly half of all Internet traffic is automated, with a large chunk of this automated traffic being made up of bad bots.

Bot attacks are something one of our customers, True Alliance, was facing before using our solution. Regan MacDonald, the Group IT Manager at True Alliance, said the following:

“Almost all types of fraud hitting our websites use bots today. Over the past years, we have seen malicious automation grow in volume and sophistication. Our revenue was at risk, our website performance and customer experience were getting hit, and our IT costs were increasing as we were trying to keep up with the malicious traffic.”

There are so many problems that bad bots can cause today, including the likes of:

Account Takeover (ATO)

This is when a cybercriminal gains access to your personal details and uses them to unlock your bank account. They can use hacker bots or scraper bots to get vital information from websites or network systems, meaning they’re able to use your pin code or bank details to make payments and withdraw money.

From a business perspective, this is damaging to you on two accounts. Firstly, cybercriminals can make fraudulent purchases on your website, which will then be discovered and refunded to the victim. Therefore, you will lose money from purchases that you thought were legitimate. Secondly, if data is stolen from your site and many of your customers suffer from identity theft, it looks bad on you and your reputation is ruined.

Application DDoS

DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common and a popular method for hackers to bring down a server or network service. DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service, and it refers to instances where bots flood a server with so much traffic that it can’t maintain its performance. As a result, the server goes down, leading to delays and increased downtime.

Already, this is damaging as it means you miss out on lots of potential traffic, which could be converted into leads and sales, etc. Also, things like ongoing ad campaigns continue to run, but you see no benefits as your site is down. To make matters worse, hackers will often keep your network offline until you pay them to release their bots and let you bring the server back up.

Denial of Inventory

Denial of Inventory involves automated bots taking products out of circulation by adding them to a user’s basket. The purpose of this is to prevent genuine consumers from purchasing the item. The threat actor does not have any intention of completing the checkout process, but they are maliciously trying to stop other people from buying the products in question.

Carding

Very similar to account takeover, only carding refers to fraudulent payments via credit cards. If this happens all the time on your site, it can leave you with a poor merchant history that makes it impossible to accept credit card payments in the future.

Cracking

Cracking is a term used to describe when someone carries out a security hack for malicious or criminal reasons. The person behind the incident is called a “cracker.” It is all about accessing things you should not have and reaching places you should not be. Examples include network cracking, password cracking, and software cracking.

Web Scraping

Web scraping involves utilizing bots to extract data and content from a website. Unlike screen scraping, which will only copy pixels that are displayed onscreen, web scraping is able to extract the HTML code that lays beneath the surface, and with this, the data stored in the database. This means the scraper is able to replicate the full content on the site elsewhere.

There can be legitimate uses of web scraping, for example, web scraping can be used by marketing research businesses to pull data from social media and forums. Price comparison websites also make the most of bots to fetch prices and product descriptions automatically.

However, web scraping can also be used for malicious reasons, for example, to steal copyrighted content or to undercut prices. If you are targeted by a scraper, your business may end up experiencing significant monetary losses, particularly if your business deals in content distribution or heavily depends on competitive pricing models.

Stolen websites

Scraper bots can basically replicate and “steal” your entire website by extrapolating all of the information from it and using it to build a different site. From here, the cybercriminals responsible can steal lots of web traffic from your site, meaning your business gets fewer leads and might make fewer sales.

Additionally, scraper bots are often used to take prices from your site and then use this data to undercut you. As a result, other businesses offer the same products/services at a much lower price than yours, costing you more customers and money.

It’s also common for scraper bots to steal content from other sites and place it on theirs. Again, this is harmful to your website as it means the scraper site benefits from your content, driving traffic to it. Even worse, it looks like your site has duplicate content, which hits you with an SEO penalty and moves you further down the rankings, getting less traffic.

Spam reviews

Bad bots have also been used by rival businesses to leave false reviews on websites. This can deter other consumers from buying products as it makes your service look poor because of the bad reviews. Again, you lose out on revenue and struggle to find new customers.

Political persuasion

Impersonator bots are often used by politicians to get their points across. They present themselves as social media users, typically posting about political topics and showing support for a certain party. The party themselves could commission these bots, or avid supporters can do it without their permission. You also see bots retweeting or liking tweets that politicians have made, making their points seem more popular than they are.

As such, bad bots present a serious risk to society as they can influence the election results. It is generally agreed that these bots spread disinformation and will often prey on the less informed, making them believe things that aren’t true.

Fraudulent ads

Speaking of ad campaigns, bad bots are used to disrupt them in a couple of ways. Owners of PPC advertising sites may use bots to provide loads of fraudulent clicks on adverts through their system. In turn, clients will be paying them for every click, not knowing that the majority of the clicks are fake.

Similarly, bots can be used to drive up the cost of advertising by generating these clicks. The more clicks there are, the higher the industry rates will be, and someone will profit.

Inventory pileup

Hacker bots will often be programmed to visit an e-commerce site and add as many products to the basket as possible. As a result, these products now come up as out-of-stock on the website, meaning other shoppers can’t purchase them.

For a business, this means you are missing out on sales as people go to buy things, but there’s apparently no stock available. Therefore, they might visit a rival site and make a purchase there instead.