What Is A Bot?

Date First Published: 19th November 2023

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Network Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

Good Bots and Bad Bots
Bot Management Software

Learn about what a bot is in this article.

A bot is an automated program or script that is programmed to perform certain tasks. They operate much faster than human users because they are automated, making them useful for repetitive and detail-oriented tasks. In addition, they are available 24/7 and can complete tasks without breaks. There are several different types of bots available for different tasks.

Good Bots and Bad Bots

Good bots perform useful functions, like customer service, or crawling and indexing webpages to be displayed in search engines to help other users. These are used for productive purposes. For example, modern chatbots are commonly used in customer service roles, helping people to resolve simple problems, which saves having to use a customer service agent for every question. These can mimic a real person and have human-like conversations over online chat. Search engine bots scan webpages for content, and once crawled, they are indexed and displayed in the search results.

Bad bots perform malicious functions, like capturing email addresses and adding them to a spam mailing list, scraping website content and republishing it without permission, engaging in click fraud campaigns, and sending large numbers of automated requests to websites to overload them so that they cannot respond to legitimate requests. Bad bots often use botnets to carry out malicious tasks, meaning that copies of the bot are running on multiple devices. Since each device has its own IP address, botnet traffic comes from a range of different IP addresses, making it harder to identify and block the source of malicious bot traffic.

Bot Management Software

Bot management software can filter out harmful bot activity using machine learning. It is usually able to identify and block bad bots based on behaviour analysis which detects suspicious patterns of activity, such as repeated login attempts in a very short amount of time, and still allow good bots to access websites without impacting the user experience or causing disruption. Bad bots can also be blocked based on IP address, which is useful for blocking traffic coming from one specific bot.

CAPTCHAs provide challenges that help differentiate bots from humans. It is most commonly used in web forms and contains tests that are impossible for most automated programs to recognise. CAPTCHAs may also be triggered by a user resembling bot behaviour, like clicking through hyperlinks very quickly or having JavaScript disabled.