INTRODUCTION

How often have you been prompted to type in a CAPTCHA while using an internet application, to prove that you are a human and not a bot! Studies show that more than half the traffic on the net comes from bots or software applications that perform automated tasks for almost anything on the internet. The internet ecosystem is flooded with bots, both good and bad. So what is a bot?

Bot is short for Robot. An internet bot or web robot is a software application that runs automated scripts over the internet. They are used to perform tasks which are highly repetitive in nature and would normally take up a lot of time if done manually. Search engines use bots to index Web pages for ranking in search results. Bots are also used for delivery of media and live streaming for different types of browsers.

GOOD AND BAD BOTS

Bots are widely used in web crawling, wherein an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers much faster than humans can. Instant messengers and online gaming applications are two popular examples of bots. There are generally good (legitimate) and bad (malicious) bots.

The following are some of the good bots.

Spider Bots: These are used by the search engines to explore Web pages for content, organization and linking. Spider bots have certain criteria for indexing and determine the ranking of Web pages within the search results.
Trading Bots: These are bots that spider the online auction sites to locate the best deals on a specific product or service. In this case, a trading bot is used for commercial gain.

Let’s look at some of the bad bots which are used to perform malicious acts and network security breaches.

Spam bots are bots that spider the internet to collect data from forms that are filled out online, spread advertisements and pop-ups throughout the internet and collect email addresses for the purpose of spamming.
Hacker bots are bots used by hackers to crawl around the internet and look out for vulnerabilities in websites and online applications so they can exploit them for malicious purposes.
Botnets are networks that hackers set up online by using zombie computers to perform malicious acts like denial of service attacks. [Zombie computers are computers that have been taken over by the hacker without the knowledge of the computer’s owner].
Bots affect online gaming economies by encroaching into Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games to farm for resources that would otherwise take significant time or effort to obtain.
Bots are also used to increase views for YouTube videos.
Bots are used to increase traffic counts on analytics reporting to extract money from advertisers.
Bots are used to make inflammatory posts to disrupt internet forums.
Bot farms are used in online app stores to manipulate positions or increase ratings.

CHATBOTS

Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversations between machines and human users. Using Artificial Intelligence and carefully designed scripts, advanced chatbots can process the language of customers to answer their complex queries. They give the impression in the minds of customers of interacting with a human.

BOTS IN INDUSTRY

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