What are Bots?
In summary: Bot on the web is a software which performs tasks in an automated way. You may also see it as Web Bot, Web Robot, WWW Bot.
What are Bots?
A bot is software that performs programmed and automated processes. They carry out every instruction given to them by the creator without any human intervention. Bots are designed to perform human processes in the same way that humans would. Their main purpose of creation is to perform repetitive tasks at a much higher speed than a human.
Non-Malicious & Malicious Bots
As we said, bots are designed to perform specific activities or tasks in place of humans. The planned activity can be either malicious or non-malicious. Malicious bots are mainly aimed at stealing, infecting and even shutting down a target.
What are the most common types of bots on the internet?
Spider Bots: they are programmed to visit web pages on the internet, download them and index the content on them. This indexing results in the retrieval of data during the search. Spider bots are also known as web crawlers.
One popular use of Spider bots is in search engines.
Scraper Bots: They are programmed to read data from websites and store their content. The stored content may be reused. This action of reading part or all of the content on the website page is known as scraping.
Spam Bots: they are programmed to collect email addresses from various websites. Once a huge amount of email addresses is collected, the spammers can use it to send spam or for any other malicious purpose.
Social Media Bots: programmed to create social media messages are known as Social Media Bots. They are also used to create fake accounts in order to increase the number of followers.
Download Bots: Download Bots are programmed to automatically download applications for mobile devices. They are used to obtain a huge number of downloads in well-known app stores to help new apps increase their download numbers. They are also used to create many fake downloads as the initial phase of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack.
Ticketing Bots: they are created for the mass purchase of tickets to known events. The intention is to resell the tickets to increase profit. Automated robots are estimated to buy tickets in the range of 40 to 95%. This type of ticket purchase is considered illegal in some countries, although it is not prohibited by law.
