What Is a Bot? Common Bot Types

Bots have become integral to our lives, offering many benefits across various industries. Of all these bots, there are good bots, bots for telling dad jokes and (significantly less cool) bots focused on distributing malware. Understanding the types of bots out there should help you harness the power of good bots while helping you identify bots to avoid.

This article will explore all types of bots, empowering you to make informed decisions and reap the rewards while keeping risks at bay.

What is a bot?

A bot is a software program that performs specific tasks over the internet. It can handle a wide range of tasks, from simple, repetitive manual processes to more complex ones. Advanced tasks include: 

• Web crawling
• Data collection
• Malicious attacks 
• Automated website testing

The history of bots dates back to as early as 1950 when software programs were developed to automate specific tasks. Eliza was one of the earliest bots that could converse with humans. Then, the bot Freddy, which had more autonomy than Eliza, was developed around 1970. After that, several bots evolved and spread over the internet. 

Today, several bot types are used across different industries for various purposes.  These bots can be divided into two categories: good and bad bots, depending on their intention. 

What are good bots?

Good Bots are bots designed to perform legitimate activities. Unlike bad bots with malicious intentions, good bots perform helpful and ethical activities. 

Let’s dig into some examples.

Good bot types

Search engine bots

Also known as ‘web crawlers,’ these bots are employed by popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing to crawl the internet and find the information you need. These bots perform web crawling and indexing to improve the efficiency and searchability of search engine queries. 

A few examples of search engine bots include GoogleBot, Bingbot, DuckDuckGo, and Amazonbot.

Backlink checker bots

Backlinks are important in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve the rankings of websites in search results. Backlink checker bots help discover the backlinks for a particular web page and analyze their progress and quality — they also check the quality of the existing backlinks, allowing you to boost the ranking of the web page. Examples of such bots include Ahrefs, Botster, and Ninja SEO. 

(Check out our Splunk for SEO intro.)

Social media bots

These bots are specifically designed to automate tasks on social media platforms. They can do all sorts of things, like: 

• Create and post social media posts
• Collect user information
• Provide customer support 
• Do important things like tweet every second of the movie Goodfellas:

00:15:37 pic.twitter.com/m15Gct15vX

— Every Goodfellas Second (@everygoodfella) June 12, 2023

These bots can also act as bad bots, carrying out social media spamming and various hijacking activities. Some 

Chatbots

This is a common type of bot found on many websites. The main objective of chatbots is to provide 24/7 assistance for customers regarding products or services. These bots can provide a pre-defined set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and guide users through performing specific processes, allowing companies to boost their customer support. 

Gaming bots

Gaming bots are specifically designed to perform game-related activities like mimicking real players in multiplayer games, supplying gaming information, and testing games. 

E-commerce bots

These bots are also a type of chatbot that assist with products or services. They can provide additional functionalities like recommending products and helping with product purchases.

Benefits of bots

When used for good purposes, bots can offer numerous benefits to users. 

Improve the efficiency of repetitive tasks - Handle routine tasks like providing information, answering FAQs, gathering data, and handling customer inquiries.

Improve user experience - Chatbots especially enable companies to provide 24/7 customer support whenever they need assistance with a product or service.

Handling high transaction volumes - Some bots can be designed to perform a large volume of actions simultaneously, reducing manual labor.

Reduce costs - Bots aid in cost reduction as they can interact with customers using frequently asked questions (FAQs), thereby minimizing the customer support staff required. 

Providing customizations - Bots can provide personalized recommendations for products using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.

What are bad bots?

Put simply, bad bots are bots designed to perform various harmful activities. Sounds simple enough, but they can pose a serious threat.

Bad bots can act as malware, exploiting vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to user accounts. Bad bots can also target specific organizations to tarnish their image on social media by posting fake news or spamming everyone they know. These bots are typically implemented by cybercriminals or anyone seeking to exploit the vulnerabilities of targeted users.

Bad bots are now becoming more sophisticated with advanced strategies. A few examples of bad bot types include spam bots, DDOS bots, scraper bots, and credential-stuffing bots — each specialized to carry out specific malicious activities. 

Bad bot types

DDoS bots

These bots are designed to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on websites, networks, or servers. Such bots can send a huge volume of traffic to the target that it cannot handle, making it unavailable to legitimate users. Such bots typically belong to a botmaster who controls many bots. 

Spambots

Spambots can send spam messages to targets. For example, spam bots can launch phishing attacks, or post bad comments on social media to tarnish the image of a particular brand or company. They can also market illegal products or services. 

Account takeover bots (ATO)

These bots, also known as  ‘credential stuffing bots’, can access user accounts by launching credential stuffing attacks. Such bots can use stolen usernames and passwords or brute-force techniques to hack user accounts. User identities are compromised with other sensitive information like credit card and bank account details. 

Malware distribution bots

These bots can distribute malware like ransomware, viruses, trojan horses, worms, and many more. They can exploit vulnerabilities in target systems and propagate malware. Once the system is infected with malware, it may carry out different types of malicious activities, such as file encryption, stealing sensitive data, and spreading malware to other parts of the system.

Scalper bots

If you’ve tried to buy a PlayStation 5 or get Taylor Swift tickets, you’re unfortunately familiar with scalper bots.

A bot designed to purchase fast-moving products or services in bulk, scalper bots make it difficult for genuine customers to complete legitimate purchases. Such bots can then resell the hauled goods or services through reselling websites for a larger cost. Examples of these bots include: 

• Grinch bots that can purchase tickets during holidays 
• Spinner bots which can market items on other websites. 

Clickbots

Clickbots can automatically click links on websites, creating a huge volume of traffic. These bots then trick the advertisers with these artificially created user clicks. Furthermore, such fake clicks can deceive search engine rankings. However, clickbots can also be designed for good purposes, like automating website testing. 

How to avoid bad bots

It can be challenging to avoid bad bots, as they can be difficult to detect. However, you can minimize the risk of encountering and being affected by bad bots. The following are some effective ways to avoid bad bots.

Implementing CAPTCHA 

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge that acts as an extra layer of security for a website. CAPTCHA requires website users to prove that they are humans by solving a particular challenge. Because automated bots can’t solve this challenge, they won’t be be able to enter the website. 

Additionally, you can implement Google reCAPTCHA to distinguish between human users and bots.

Use anti-bot solutions

Nowadays, cybersecurity providers have introduced many bot detection solutions to automate bot detection and prevention. Such anti-bot solutions can accurately detect bots using advanced techniques like machine learning and fingerprinting. Utilizing such an automated solution allows companies to reduce the possibility of bot attacks. 

Honeypots

Honeypots are targets that attract cybercriminals to steal information. They allow us to monitor the behavior of bots and their techniques while tracing their operating locations. You can fool the bot and prevent it from being attracted to the actual website by employing such fake content. 

Web Application Firewalls (WAF)

WAFs can identify and block malicious bot traffic by analyzing the incoming network traffic. WAF rules can be set to identify and block suspicious activity, including bot-related behavior.

(Read all about the different types of firewalls.)

Network and access log analysis

You can identify failed login attempts by analyzing access logs. The analysis may also reveal sudden spikes or abnormal access patterns, indicating a bot attack. Additionally, network traffic logs help discover unusual IP addresses, abnormal traffic patterns, and spikes that deviate from normal traffic patterns. 

Educate users

Train and educate users on identifying and eliminating bad bots. 

(Understanding malicious bots is key in bolstering your cyber threat intelligence.)

Regularly update software

Regular software or system updates contain the most important security updates. Those updates could patch security vulnerabilities that bots can exploit. Thus, it is advisable to enable automatic updates whenever possible to ensure you always have the latest security patches.