The increasing Bot count and how to fight against these?

Bots, can take over the world at a speed which is pretty faster than you can anticipate. A latest infographic showed that the percentage of bot traffic on websites is more when compared with human traffic. The survey showed that compared to the last report about 21% growth in bot traffic for cloud based services has been witnessed recently.

In terms of figures, of 100, 38.5% traffic is of human, while the remaining 61.5% comprises of bot, which differs from safe to malicious in types. The two most possible reasons describing this drastic increase in bot traffic entails: first pointing at the new online services introducing new bot traffic online, while the second reason describes some useful bots that are programmed to visit the same website regularly having shorter patterns. This means the bot visit a website more than these used to, leading to an increased traffic on the site.

Good Bot Vs the Bad Bot

The report indicates that while the count of malicious bots has remained almost unchanged. The Spam Bot activity has gone down by about half a percent this year and about two percent from last year. This has become possible with the anti-spam campaign by the search engine giant, Google. The latest Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 2.1 updates by Google have caused a fall of about 75% in the automated link-spamming activity carried online.

Now, for the bad Bot, even when Spam activity has gone down, there has been an 8% rise in the group of unclassified bots, most of which aim at hostile intentions. These bots try to deceive the identity of a person to find a way through the security measures of any website. These can primarily be divided into four different types of malicious bots.

Bot Vs Human Traffic Distribution 38.5% Human Traffic Vs 61.5% Bot Traffic The 61.5% divides as;  31% by search engines and other good bots that has gone up by 55% Scarpers, remaining Unchanged, comprise of 5% Hacking Bots gone down by 10%, comprises of total 4.5% of the traffic Spammers gone down by 75% comprises 0.5% of the total Bot traffic Impersonators, which has gone up by 8%, comprises of 20.5% traffic In 2012- 49% human plus 51% Bots In 2013- 38.5% human plus 61.5% Bots In 2014-???

What these bot types are and what effect can this cause

1. First are the Scrappers that target almost anyone randomly, but primarily include websites, travel industry, news websites, classified sites, forums and online stores. These carry out activities like content duplication, robbing email addresses for spamming and reverse engineering prices and the entire business models.
2. Spammers are the next category, which lurk on forums, blogs and other sites that are used for posting any kind of content. The spammers work by posting content that is irrelevant and annoying and includes malware links that can harm the security of other visitors on the site. These bot can finally convert the site into a ‘Link farm’, which according to search engines is spam and can be blacklisted.
3. Hacking is the third type of bot that is linked with websites based on Vbulletin and Joomla primarily. These can do anything from data theft to injecting and embedding malware links, hijacking severs and defacing or deleting the content on any website.
4. Last type is Impersonators, which can be found anywhere and can even target any user. These automated and sneaky spy bots are above all others. These can cause layer seven DDoS attacks, which can finally cause website downtime and service degradation.

The bottom line:

It’s no doubt that hackers and cyber criminals are getting smarter, but you still have ways to overpower them. So, be more careful about the websites you surf and about content you post and share on these. Today there are endless antivirus available, which can help in fighting all such existing and emerging threats easily.  The one which seems to be a preferred choice on this front is Webroot antivirus, you can know more about this by calling experts at the Webroot technical support number at SupportBuddy.

A site that offers IT support for everybody, SupportBuddy, has a dedicated Webroot tech support number, where experts can help you get improved protection, which means keeping off your PC against threats, even if it’s those malicious bots!