Bots are software that are exploited to run repetitive and automated tasks on the Internet. These crawlers operate at astronomically high speed and accomplish the assigned tasks with impressive efficiency and accuracy. Bots are of different types, such as text-reading bots, social media bots, spider bots, chatbots, transactional bots, download bots, and so forth. Often, we categorize bots as good and bad, where the former are the ones that do not trigger any malicious impact on the site or the user or hold back the values or benefits from the user. On the flip side, bad bots are notorious crawlers who intend to commit fraud or theft. Such bots facilitate misuse, abuse, and attacks on sites, APIs, and mobile apps.
Introduction to bots: Good Vs. Bad Bots
Bots are typically taken as the crawlers that roam the web to index the sites, thereby facilitating the website to appear in SERPs. A successful indexing process encourages more traffic to the platform and enables newly added pages to get found more quickly. However, bots are not always angels.
Criminal hackers employ certain hostile bots to steal financial or confidential information, launch cyberattacks, spam, and much more.
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How can bots negatively impact your site/ business?
Malicious bots can impact your site’s performance in many ways, thereby directly influencing your business and revenue. Here are the main ways they can impact your site/ business:
1. Bots can impede your website speed
If you notice an abrupt increase in your site’s traffic which appears rather unusual, then the traffic must have likely emerged from bots. Implementing filters on the web analytics reports won’t prevent these bots from barging into your website. Eventually, this influx of traffic lowers the page speed when new visitors come to the site.
In the case of eCommerce sites, customers prefer to engage with sites that load rapidly, while the site limps when loading impacts brand loyalty. Poor site speed renders a bad experience to the visitors, and 79% of these individuals are never likely to revert to the site. Terrible user experience means low customer satisfaction, which contributes to degraded conversion rates. Therefore, optimizing and keeping the site speed as fast as possible is crucial.
2. Bots can steal confidential customer information
When filling out a form, customers express their trust in the company, and else they would not have provided you with sensitive details about themselves. Nonetheless, spiteful bots that mosey through and scrape the website might steal the data entered in the form, including their email addresses. There are two types of scraping, which include contact scraping and content scraping. Web scraping is not innately bad rather it comes across as a sturdy tool for businesses to outrun their rivals. For instance, one can backtrack competitor pricing or use them for market research.
Contact bots crawl the websites and download email addresses and websites. Criminal hackers then employ the information to trigger phishing campaigns or crank out spam movements.
3. Bots can impact site security
You must have heard of botnets, an amalgam of two words, robot and network. Criminal hackers create botnets to commit cyber offenses. They do so by discovering the already infected devices to erect a botnet. The higher the number of bots connected, its impact is more powerful.
Botnets are exploited to overload or derange the website by implementing them on a specific site so that it cannot properly function after that. Such an attack is also termed a DDoS attack or denial of service attack. As soon as the website is jolted offline, it becomes dysfunctional to the targeted visitors.
4. Bots can negatively influence brand reputation
We just saw that malicious bots are used to extract email addresses and other sensitive details about the visitors by criminal hackers. Hostile actors behind bad bots can make fake accounts crank out false product reviews and fake content, directly impacting brand reputation. If a site ever experiences a cyberattack, it is often hairy to recuperate it completely, especially in the case of small and medium businesses.
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How to prevent bot attacks on your website/ eCommerce platform?
As you are now aware of the havoc bad bots can wreak on your website, it becomes imperative to think of measures to prevent such attacks in the first place. Here are some actionable tips you can execute:
- Safeguard every malicious bot access points
- Attentively assess traffic sources
- Scrutinize traffic spikes
- Track the failed login attempts
- Investigate the surge in failed verification of gift card numbers
- Pay attention to public data infringements
- Block proxy services and known hosting providers
- CAPTCHA or block outdated browsers/ user agents
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