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What are Automated Bot Attacks?

The attack through independent operations performing a variety of tasks, majorly exploiting the weaknesses and vulnerabilities is called Automated Bot Attacks. These employ malicious codes, scripts and bots to imitate human behavior. For example, making purchases, posting on sites, and logging into accounts, but on a larger scale. Bot attacks require almost no human intervention. Such attacks can lead to financial loss and exposure of personal information. Moreover, they are difficult to detect because of mimicking human behavior. Therefore a defense system is crucial for organizations to safeguard data.

How Users Fall a Prey to Such Attacks

Users easily fall for such traps because of the lack of awareness. Phishing tricks, on the other hand, trick the users into giving sensitive information that can be used by bots to access the accounts. Similarly, without the protection of the network, data theft is a common mishap. Connection to an unsecured public network leads to MITM attacks, resulting in loss of data. Sometimes, fake accounts are also created to promote misleading information ad scams. Users clicking on such posts expose themselves to fraud and social engineering schemes.

Types of Bot Attacks

Brute Force Attacks

Bots attempt to crack your password systematically by trying different combinations of hints gained via your social accounts. The attempts are made even up to thousands of times unless the correct one is found. Weak and simple passwords are the most vulnerable to such attacks.

Credential Stuffing

Stolen data from previous breaches is used across multiple websites hoping you have reused the same credentials. This leads to data theft and fraudulent transactions.
These attacks involve flooding of a website disrupting the normal functioning of servers and business operations. Legitimate users can not access the servers and the company’s reputation is damaged. Botnets are compromised devices which are used in such attacks.

Web Scraping

Scraping bots extract data about products and customers from websites. Malicious scrapping harms businesses as it steals competitive data and violates terms of services.

Ad Fraud

Fake clicks and impressions are generated to defraud advertisers wasting their budgets, reading ROI and undermining the integrity of ad network.

Preventions

1. Strong Password

This step reduces the potential risks of Brute force attack and credential stuffing. Complex passwords employing a combination of upper-lower case alphabets, numbers and symbols are harder for bots to guess. Automated attacks often rely on password dictionaries, so using a unique password reduces the success rate of such attacks. Using a Password Manager helps in this regard by generating and storing complex passwords in encrypted format. This protects passwords from unauthorized access even if the device is compromised.

2. CAPTCHA

This is an effective policy to implement to prevent bot attacks. CAPTCHAs act as gatekeepers and distinguish between human users and autonomous bots. They design tasks such as identifying text, puzzles, or recognizing images, that are difficult for bots to complete. Captcha blocks automated log-ins and prevents spam account creation. Similarly, they ensure real users comment on a post, which mitigates spam comments leading to malicious links, keeping the platform free from harmful content. They also analyze behavior such as mouse movements or time taken to complete a task, which is even harder to bypass for automated attacks.

3. Honeypots

A trap for bots that appears to have valuable data but is designed to monitor bot activity is called a honeypot. It acts as a bait that redirects bots from real sensitive systems, drawing the attention of the bot towards itself. This also provides insights into the type of bots and their attacking scheme. The data helps the security teams how to defense real systems. Once the behavior is analyzed, the data helps to block and slow down future attacks as the resources of bots are wasted in honeypots. Moreover, the security teams can differentiate between bots and real users by comparing their patterns, and the possibility of blocking legitimate users is reduced.

4. Domain Name System Protection

The caution and vigilance at the DNS level, keeping the malicious sites from reaching the system, prevents bot attacks. As the DNS translates domain names into IP addresses, integrating filters at this level would prevent bots from executing malicious tasks. DNS employs threat intelligence to block notorious malicious domains that are used to execute attacks. Moreover, DNS protection filters out bad traffic that was flooded by DDoS attacks offering traffic-scrubbing. Your access is also limited to only known and trusted domains which ultimately reduces the chances of bots exploitations.

5. Controlling log in Attempts

Controlling or throttling means limiting the access of a particular user or IP address to log in. It has become easier for bots to try multiple password combinations in a specific duration. Throttling slows down the process and reduces the effectiveness of such attacks. Similarly, credential stuffing is prevented as login attempts are now limited, which makes bots unable to cycle multiple combinations. Moreover, account lockouts set the user to disable after a certain number of failed attempts. Bots are prevented from continuing their attempts and no progress is made.