Bots are computer programs that are direct to conduct a certain set of adverse actions automatically. At times their actions may need human intervention or assistance at some point to make sure they are doing their job.
Why are bots create? The concept behind making and using bots is that they can automatically do some tasks that are repetitive and mundane. These tasks often take time when humans carry them out. They are also use to ensure tasks are done with precision and without mistake.
The purpose of using bots
Bots are often made and program to carry out certain tasks. Among them are filling out forms and submitting them after duly filling them, crawling web pages, downloading files/content, inspecting of web pages, and the like. They have also use for generating likes and following on social media, as well as interacting with users on social media platforms.
Examples of bots used for multiple purposes are form fillers, web page crawlers, chatbots, etc.
Are there things like good bots and bad bots? If so, what is the difference?
Good bots
No bot was create equal. It also was never create to serve the same intention or purpose. Some bots are design for a really helpful purpose whereas some are made for horrendous purposes.
Experts at a well-known DDoS Protection Service provider based in New York City reveal that bots are now being made for the purpose of cybercrimes. THey’ve been use to spread viruses remotely, overload website traffic, and even infiltrate data networks.
The good bots are helpful to humans by providing helpful services, like customer support for automated responses, search engine optimization for crawling web pages and search engines, and for monitoring website performance, giving website admins and owners alerts of anything out of the ordinary.
Websites incorporating bots in themselves must follow Google’s rules pertaining to both operations and performance. They are found in the text file title robots.txt.
Bad bots
Bad Bots are create for the specific purpose of harming products, attacking websites, damaging web apps, penetrating mobile apps to extract information, interrupting online services with abruption along with carrying out numerous forms of cyberattacks.
Common examples of them are email harvesting bots (which collect email addresses for spam and hacking) and DDoS bots (designed to attack websites and cause internet disruptions). The latter kind of bot is use for attacking websites and exhausting their resources.
In many instances, bots can easily control by remote means in an internet network which is known as a botnet. Such a network can use for launching cyberattacks against websites, web applications, mobile apps, hosting servers, and virtual servers along with cloud servers.
A bit about Bot Management
Many sources claim that bot activity accounts for nearly 50% of all Internet traffic. Some bots are malicious, while others are “benign,” just as some software is malware but not all.
Any bot that abuses an internet product or service qualifies as “bad.” Bots can range from the clearly harmful, such as bots that attempt to hack into user accounts, to more minor types of resource misappropriation, such as bots that purchase tickets on an event website.
Bot Management is a process offering entities real-time protection against bad bots. Its main tasks are blocking bot attacks and filtering them out to allow the good bots for crawling websites on the internet, search engines, and other online places for multiple purposes (web analytics and web monitoring are among them).
Google’s web crawlers are among the good bots. They are usually need in cyberspace so that Google’s search engine, pages, results, and websites are crawl for indexing and other SEO-relate purposes.
A bot that provides a useful or need service is deem “good.” Good bots include customer care chatbots,
search engine crawlers, and performance monitoring bots. Bots that are good to look for and follow the rules in a website’s robots.txt file.
Bot management also helps detect suspicious bot activity by identifying the negative ones and stopping them in their tracks.
In which form is bot management software available?
Bot managers are software and different types of bot management software are present for the detention of differences between human website visitors and bots, analysis of various bot behaviors, determining the origin of bots and their traffic, maintaining a website’s online reputation, and protecting IP addresses and their reputation too.
Such software also enables website admins and owners to add good bots
in a protect list so websites can be crawl and analyzed with ease. However, that very list needs to be check timely to make sure there are no lapses.
Google Bot is one of the best examples of a good bot. It is use for indexing web pages and ranking them on search engine result pages. The bots of Google are classified as good bots.
