Malicious Purposes
The potential for internet bots to be used for malicious purposes is frequently exploited. The most widely used anti-bot technique is the use of CAPTCHA, which is designed to distinguish between a human user and a less-sophisticated bot by means of a character recognition task that, ideally, only humans can perform successfully. This test can stop spambots from adding large amounts of spam to the webpage.
Web spiders can also be used with malicious intent, although each server spidered may have a file called robots.txt which may contain rules for the bot to follow. The usual purpose of this file is to stop harmless bots from accidentally doing something wrong, however, as bots designed specifically to be malevolent can easily ignore the file entirely.
Some malicious purposes for bots include:
- Web spiders, when used to scrape a web server for content, can be considered malicious in cases where the scraped content is republished elsewhere without the consent of the website owner. These spiders are also sometimes set to scrape as quickly as possible, often causing the attacked server problems as it consumes too much bandwidth.
- Spambots that automatically add spam, usually advertisements, to webpages. They can also more traditionally be used to harvest email addresses from internet forums, contact forms or guestbook pages for the creation of further spam via email.
- Botnets and zombie computers, which are created when victims' computers unknowingly run a bot that allows them to be remotely controlled by the attacker.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, often perpetrated by botnets.
- Gaming bots, which help a person cheat in an online game, especially in persistent-world games such as MMORPGS, where they can have a significant negative effect on the in-game economy.
- Votebots which automatically cast votes for or against certain forms of user-contributed content such as videos on YouTube or reader comments on blogs.
- File-name modifiers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. These change the names of files (often containing malware) to match user search queries.
- Any automation of a task where human input is mandatory for the system to function fairly. For example, a bot that continually adds someone's name to a raffle faster than humanly possible.
Read more about this topic: Internet Bot
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