Can bots be harmful? (2023)

What are the risks of bots?

A bot is a software application that automatically performs certain tasks quickly and at scale. It is a tool that can be used for good or bad purposes. Good bots are integral to our daily online lives, while bad bots can seriously damage your business if you don't properly protect yourself.

Bots Can Steal Sensitive Information

The controllers behind the bots can then use it to spam other websites or sell it to your competitors. Some bots are even advanced enough to harvest your customers' financial data, including credit card numbers and social security numbers.

Malware bots and internet bots can be programmed/hacked to break into user accounts, scan the internet for contact information, to send spam, or perform other harmful acts. To carry out these attacks and disguise the source of the attack traffic, attackers may distribute bad bots in a botnet – i.e., a bot network.

Bots are normally used to automate certain tasks, meaning they can run without specific instructions from humans. An organization or individual can use a bot to replace a repetitive task that a human would otherwise have to perform. Bots are also much faster at these tasks than humans.

If you have a website, you need to know what bots are and how they can find your site, as well as what they can do (either intentionally or indirectly) to cause frustration to your online marketing efforts. Blocking bots may be a necessity to protect your site's speed, users, and security.

Some bots are legitimate—for example, Googlebot is an application used by Google to crawl the Internet and index it for search. Other bots are malicious—for example, bots used to automatically scan websites for software vulnerabilities and execute simple attack patterns.

Bot fighting itself is not illegal and is in fact a popular sport in San Fransokyo, but betting on it is illegal and could result in imprisonment. Many underground bot-fights allow betting and even hold full tournamets, which makes it lucrative.

While sometimes called “bots” or “spam” or “fake accounts,” all refer to inauthentic accounts that imitate how people use Twitter. Some spam accounts are automated, but others are operated by people, making it complicated to detect them.

Bots often imitate a human user's behavior, but with their speed and volume advantages they can unfairly find and buy products in ways human customers can't. Online shopping bots perform different malicious tasks. An individual bot may do one or more of these.

How are social bots harmful?

For example, some bots are used to generate fake followers on social media platforms. Others might click on social ads in feeds to eat up your social media advertising budget. Some malicious actors might even use bot-operated social accounts to spread rumors and disinformation about your company and products online.

A social bot usually posts using a fake account – with its own profile photo, posts, and a good amount of followers or 'friends'. The social bot uses this account to distribute its marketing messages or political statements. This can be done via likes and retweets or in the form of posts or comments.