Bots generally refer to software which runs automated tasks and script. But with the existence of bad bots, a more significant percentage of which are referred to as Advanced Persistent Bots are now involved in most criminal enterprises including fraud and theft.
Internet bots are of great help to people especially in this computer age we found ourselves, from helping to match queries with the most relevant results on search engines to indexing and a lot of other tasks.
But sadly, these great bots which are of countless help to people are used to carry heinous actions by negative-minded individuals. These horrific actions go as far as extracting website information without permission with the sole aim of reselling and reusing such to gain a competitive edge over the original owners.
All these as made the advancements of bots a significant threat to humanity as they now use unspecified proxies, and are capable of changing their identities and mimicking human behavior. These capabilities are exploited by bad bot operators to hack sensitive data and credentials among other dangerous uses.
From 2013 till date, more than 14 billion sensitive data has been stolen according to a report released by Distil Networks, a network that offers web content protection services. “Every new data breach increases the availability of sensitive data which in turns attract more bad Bot,” says Distil in their 2019 report on bad Bot, and this shows that the situations are getting worse.
This year U.S. tops the list of countries from which bad bots originate, with more than half of the bad bot traffic originating from the U.S. This will be the fifth consecutive time the United States is topping the list.
The major industries affected by the effect of bot attacks include airlines, government agencies, ticketing companies, Ecommerce industries, and financial institutions.
