Cybercrime is here to stay and an important part of any company’s security measures should include identifying malicious bot types. 

According to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2023, 32% of all UK businesses and 24% of charities reported a cyberattack in the past 12 months. 

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), in partnership with the Home Office, commissioned the Cyber Security Breaches Survey of UK businesses, charities and education institutions as part of the National Cyber Security Programme. 

As the most common cyber threats are relatively unsophisticated, government guidance advises businesses and charities to protect themselves by using “cyber hygiene” measures – this should include being able to identify malicious bot types. 

The most common are updated malware protection, cloud back-ups, passwords, restricted admin rights and network firewalls – each administered by two-thirds or more of businesses and half or more charities.  

However, across the last three waves of the survey, some areas of cyber hygiene have seen consistent declines among businesses.  

This includes: 

1. use of password policies (79% in 2021, vs. 70% in 2023), 
2. use of network firewalls (78% in 2021 vs. 66% in 2023), 
3. restricting admin rights (75% in 2021, vs. 67% in 2023), 
4. policies to apply software security updates within 14 days (43% in 2021, vs. 31% in 2023). 

These trends seem to mainly affect shifts in the self-employed or sole trader business sector, and to a lesser extent, small and medium business, the results for large business have not changed significantly. 

The purpose of any “cyber hygiene” is to ensure all devices used by businesses (smartphones, laptops, tablets and desktop computers) and the services they access – both online and in the office – are protected from theft or damage. 

Cyber security is also about preventing unauthorised access to personal and profession information stored both on these devices and also online. 

Identifying malicious bot types 

Essentially, a bot is a software application programmed to carry out tasks automatically. Because they are automated, bots can run according to their instructions without needing human intervention and can operate at a much faster rate.  

Bots often imitate or replicate human behaviour and typically carry out repetitive tasks. Non-human interactions – or bot clicks – are responsible for almost half of all internet traffic – standing currently at 47.4 per cent.   

Malicious bots can be an even bigger threat than just muddying the waters of your digital marketing campaigns or affecting your online presence. 

The most common actions for malicious bots include:  

• Crawling web pages and stealing content;  
• Serving spam, scraping information, and generating fake ad impressions in online marketing campaigns;  
• Driving bad ad placements in fraudulent programmatic platforms;  
• Filling out forms with fake information to create bad leads;  
• Spamming your organisation’s contact or survey forms with bad messages—which can keep you from responding to genuine inquiries;  
• Gathering up-to-date information from websites to aid more convincing phishing & vishing campaigns;  
• Posting fraudulent reviews on websites to make products and services look better or worse than they actually are to potential customers. 

We categorise malicious bots into 12 classifications based on what their objectives are. 

These range in risk level from nuisance through to dangerous and their objectives scale from wasting ad budgets and phishing through to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) and data theft. 

Dangerous: 

Imposter – these bots create fake accounts on your product or service, their objective is to spam overload, waste time/resources and muddy your data. 

Thief – attempts to gain access to existing user accounts with the objective of committing fraud, phishing and more. 

Ghost – nuisance bot of unknown origin with unknown objectives. 

High: 

Scraper – these bots scan your website and content at high speed to fetch information with the intention of data mining, price scraping, SEO jacking, phishing and LLM training. 

Crasher – requests the same resource repeatedly in quick succession to overwhelm your infrastructure with the intention of creating a DDoS. 

Hoarder – purchases low inventory, highly sort after goods in seconds, preventing genuine customer purchase with the objective of damaging reputations, reducing inventory and wasting time/resources. 

Medium: 

Blocker – adds items to a basket and then abandons it to prevent a genuine customer purchase with the objective of blocking sales, causing inventory confusion and wasting time/resources. 

Clicker – these click on ads to commit fraud or other actions with the objective of wasting your advertising budget or muddying data. 

Scout – looks for sites to attack based on its own internal criteria with the objective of discovering weak points to exploit. 

Nuisance: 

Poster – these bots post fake reviews, comments or other data with the intention of damaging reputation, interrupting services and spreading propaganda or misinformation. 

Pretender – this type of bot sends fake traffic from a social network with the objective of muddying data or wasting ad budgets. 

Scanner – scans a site for vulnerabilities to exploit or report back on with the objective of identifying targets for attack. 

Protecting your business against malicious bots 

According to Forrester Consulting’s State Of Online Fraud And Bot Management, 78% of organisations are using denial-of-service (DDoS) protection, web application firewall (WAF), and/or content delivery networks (CDNs) to manage bots but only 19% have a full bot management system in place. 

Regardless of what kind of bot traffic you attempt to mitigate, there are three key steps in the process: 

1. Identifying bot traffic: You need to be able to identify a malicious bot from a human user in order to then implement filters to prevent it occurring again; 
2. Assessing bot behaviour: This is where understanding the difference between good and malicious bots is necessary; 
3. Blocking damaging bots: Once identified, you need to be able to prevent malicious bots from accessing your website or data. 

When evaluating the traffic of your website, you can often glean summary information about potential bot activity just by analysing basic site metrics. 

Using AI as part of the detection process for malicious bots brings the potential for organisations to spot bot-driven cyber-attacks more efficiently and also help them identify dangerous content that could potentially be missed otherwise. 

AI can also be used alongside Machine Learning (ML) to understand behaviour both of genuine human visitors and malicious bots. 

The Veracity Bot Protection Suite is our patented, AI-powered solution designed to stop malicious bots, data theft, ad click fraud and more. Ad Fraud Prevention helps block bot clicks and cuts digital ad budget waste by up to 66%. Our Web Threat Protection stops malicious bots attacking your website or your clients’.

Our protection works effortlessly alongside your existing security stack and integrates seamlessly with in place DDoS and WAF solutions. This is because it’s an essential, specialised answer to malicious bot activity.

Not an add-on. Not an afterthought. 

Get in touch and see how we can help you with your malicious bot problem: 

https://veracitytrustnetwork.com/integrated-security-stack/  

 

8th Oct 2024