The first time bots were used on the Internet en masse was in search engines. Today, 50% of website traffic is made up of bots, and half of them can cause damage. Bots can be divided into "good" and "bad".
Contents
1. "Good" bots:
2. "Bad" bots:
No matter how scary bots may look, both "good" and "bad" - they are programs written for specific purposes, collecting and exchanging data on the network. It is impossible to protect yourself completely from "bad" bots. It is necessary to monitor the quality of traffic on your site!
Contents
1. "Good" bots:
2. "Bad" bots:
"Good" bots:
- Search bots scan content. Search engines do the same thing: they check web content with spider robots to see if it matches a search query. Google and Yandex have their own bots, Googlebot and YandexBot. They work on the basis of an ever-worsening algorithm for finding suitable sites.
- Data bots provide the latest information — news, weather forecasts, exchange rates. These bots include Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri, and Alice. They are also called media bots.
- Copyright check bots check web content that may be plagiarized: articles, videos, photos without a link to the source. According to Electronic Frontier, such robots are most often found in social media, where most of the content is created by users. For example, the Content ID system on YouTube checks for the presence of copyrighted content in videos.
- Shopping bots help find the best deals on selling products online. They are useful for both buyers and sellers. A good example of such bots is the AliExpress Coupon Finder browser extension for finding coupons and discounts on AliExpress or Honey for shopping on Amazon.
"Bad" bots :
- Clickbots imitate a click from a real person. Because of their actions, the data on the effectiveness of advertising may be incorrect, but this is not the worst thing. Clickbots click away the budget on advertisements, because of them money is wasted.
- File downloader bots act like clickbots, but instead of clicking on ads, they distort the number of file downloads. In 2012, iPhone app developers massively used the services of "third-party advertising services that guarantee high ratings." This ended in scandal, and the "third-party services" had to be abandoned.
- Impostor bots imitate the actions of real users. They are easy to confuse with clickbots, but they cause more harm than wasting advertising budget on fake clicks. The purpose of such bots is to bypass information security systems. A significant part of bot traffic consists of impostor bots. They are often behind DDoS attacks. At the end of October 2016, a DDoS attack occurred on Dyn DNS, due to which half of the resources of the global network, including Twitter, temporarily stopped working. The culprit of the incident was the Mirai botnet, which used vulnerabilities in "smart" devices and was an impostor bot.
- Scraper bots are the opposite of copyright bots. Instead of protecting, these bots steal other people's content and post it elsewhere.
- Spyware collects data about people and companies to build and sell subscriber bases. For example, you receive emails from strangers to whom you definitely did not give your contact information. This could be spyware.
- Zombie bots look for weak spots in your defenses and gain access to your computing system. They work in the background, using your computer to distribute malware.
No matter how scary bots may look, both "good" and "bad" - they are programs written for specific purposes, collecting and exchanging data on the network. It is impossible to protect yourself completely from "bad" bots. It is necessary to monitor the quality of traffic on your site!
