Internet bots

Originally taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey.


Malicious purposes

Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links.

There are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:

  1. Spambots that harvest email addresses from contact forms or guestbook pages
  2. Downloader programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire web sites
  3. Web site scrapers that grab the content of web sites and re-use it without permission on automatically generated doorway pages
  4. Viruses and worms
  5. DDoS attacks
  6. Botnets / zombie computers; etc.

Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets. Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites, like TicketMaster.com. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public from also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.

Anti-bot techniques

The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of CAPTCHA, which is a form of Turing test used to distinguish between a human user and a less-sophisticated AI-powered bot, by the use of graphically encoded human-readable text.

If you are interested in securing your website, email addresses published in the content or if you need to reduce SPAM coming from your online form, please contact us.