BOTs – what, how and why?

What is a BOT?

BOT is generally a short for “Robot” and specifically for “Internet Robot”.  It is small computer program that mimics human activity on various apps, websites, social media platforms or similar by automatically and repeatedly performing certain tasks that generally humans would do.

They conduct activities they are designed or programmed to do and replicate human behavior and actions.  Being machines/software, the BOTs are faster and don’t make mistakes.

According to the 2021 research report titled “Bot Attacks: Top Threats and Trends” from security firm Barracuda (https://www.barracuda.com/bot-threat-report), more than two-thirds of internet traffic is bots. In addition, 67% of bad bot traffic originates from public data centers in North America.

BOTs are just machines.  They can be designed to do, or can be used, both for good and bad things.  Although BOTs can carry out useful functions, they can also be malicious and come in the form of malware.  BOTs are used in thousands or, may be hundreds of thousands of ways today, let’s see few ways BOTs are used from a common individual’s perspective.

BOTs use – for good purposes

•  Chatting automatically:  You may have chatted with customer service, technical support departments of various companies where the responses are very fast and standard.  This chat may have been using BOTs.  These BOTs simulate conversations with a human being.  They shot back standard responses based on key words picked up from a customer’s (your) text.  Customer service bots are available 24/7 and increase the availability of customer service employees. These programs are also called virtual representatives or virtual assistants, and free up human agents to focus on more complicated issues. Virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant and Shopbot are some examples.

• Comparing Prices:  Its very common now a days to visit a website such as https://Nanajee.com (just an example) where we can find prices of same product/service from different sources, compare them, and then select that suits us best.  These websites use BOTs in the background to deliver all this info.  These BOTs collect prices from various sources and present them on the website, or shop around the web and locate the best price for a product a user is interested in buying.

• Securing websites:  In today’s world of technology hacking, data theft, malware (malicious software) and ransom ware are not uncommon and pose a huge threat to businesses and individuals.  Even for securing systems and data BOTs are used.  Organizations use BOT Management Software that helps manage BOTs and protect against malicious bots that might harm their system.

• Knowledge gathering:  First step of doing research or an investigation is generally gathering knowledge that is already available and validating and evaluating the same.  BOTS are used for this initial knowledge gathering also.  These BOTs collect knowledge for a user by automatically visiting websites to retrieve information that meets certain specified criteria.  They are quick and can gather huge data from tons of sources in minutes.

• Helping Search engines:  Before search engines such as Google or Bing can return a list of websites of our interest, they need to know which websites has what data and which data is more relevant and current and in what order.  This activity is called indexing.  Again, search engines use BOTs for indexing.  These BOTs are called Spiders or crawlers.  These bots access websites, browse thru the pages and gather content for indexing in search engines.  This indexing results in retrieving the data on search and in giving matching results in no time.

• Performing mundane automated tasks:  Several types of BOTs are used for performing certain specific tasks that do not necessarily require human intervention.  These bots are designed to simplify tasks that would otherwise be performed by a human over the phone, such as blocking a stolen credit card or confirming a bank’s hours of operation.

BOTs use – for bad purposes

• Generating Fake Social Media Accounts and Messages:  To misguide users on the popularity of their ideas/views BOTs are used in Social Media platform too.  These BOTs are used to create fake accounts to increase the number of followers and to generate messages in social media.  They automatically support ideas and behave as a follower of users.  It is estimated that around 9 to 15% of the Twitter accounts are social bots.

• Scrapping:  Action of reading and saving some or whole of the content on the website page is known as scraping. The data read maybe names, prices, and product details in eCommerce websites.  Not all data collected thru scrapping is public, and some of it may be sensitive information such as content that is copyrighted, hence scrapping is generally not considered completely legal.  BOTs are used to read data from websites and to save the content offline. The saved content may then be reused for various purposes.

• Phishing:  Phishing is an activity where a certain email message, with deceive or fraudulent purposes, is sent to a huge number of email addresses in the hope that some people would fall into the trap and the sender of phishing emails will benefit by defrauding them.  BOTs are used for creating and sending such emails automatically

• Collecting emails and Spamming:  Sending a business or promotional email to a large list of email addresses without first seeking permission is called Spamming and is illegal.  Some businesses and/or individuals send their promotional, or even malicious, emails to a huge list of email addresses who had actually did not opt for receiving such emails.  To collect huge number of email addresses and for Spamming BOTs are used.  Such BOTs collect email addresses from social media websites, websites, and organizations. Once a huge amount of email addresses is gathered, the BOTs are used to send spam mail or for any of their malicious purposes which may include getting illegal access to email accounts.

• Increasing Downloads:  Software and/or app stores list those software and apps higher which have been downloaded more and are presumably more popular.  To create fake popularity and to get listed higher some people use BOTS to enhance the number their software/app has been downloaded.  Such Bots are programmed to automatically download software or mobile applications repeatedly several times resulting in boosting the download statistics and misleading the store as well as users about the popularity of their software/app.

• Illegal Ticket Buying:  Some people buy tickets to popular events early at list price for the purpose of reselling these later at a higher price when the ticket sale finishes.  For this purpose, they need to buy tickets in a large quantity and use BOTs.  The bots are designed to imitate human behavior of buying tickets automatically in huge quantity.  In some places this activity is illegal.

The above is just a brief introduction of BOTs from a common individual’s perspective. If someone is looking to learn more about BOTs and their utility internet internet has tons of information available.

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Babar Saeed

bsaeed@yahoo.com

April 22, 2022