What cyber attacks are bots commonly associated with?

Over the last few years, bots – and the risks associated with them – have become far more common knowledge.

Especially in the business world, where just a single DDoS attack can be enough to damage a company’s reputation, it has become essential to implement several bot mitigation strategies to counteract their malicious nature.

For newcomers into the world of business and cybersecurity, however, it can be hard to know how to mitigate bots without knowing what kind of cyber attacks, specifically, they are associated with. With this in mind, we’re going to list out the most common cyber attacks that are caused by bots, along with a few examples to demonstrate the impact they could have if left unchecked.

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks 

As mentioned earlier, a single DDoS attack can be hugely damaging to a company – especially an SME that is attempting to build their reputation. For those unaware, DDoS attacks leverage a network of compromised devices – known as ‘botnets’ – to flood a target server or network with excessive traffic, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate user requests. There are three separate variations of this:

• Volume-based attacks

These are attacks designed to consume the bandwidth of a target by flooding it with a high volume of traffic.

• Protocol attacks

Protocol attacks exploit weaknesses in a network’s protocols used to establish connections and manage traffic.

• Application layer attacks

These are attacks that target specific applications or services rather than the network infrastructure, aiming to exhaust server resources and render the application unusable.

Credential stuffing 

Another cybersecurity threat often associated with bots is known as ‘credential stuffing’. This can occur when bots automate the process of using stolen username and password combinations from previous breaches, rapidly attempting thousands or even millions of login attempts.

One notable example of this happened back in 2019, when Netflix reported a significant increase in unauthorised access attempts to user accounts. In this case, cybercriminals used credentials obtained from data breaches across various platforms to access Netflix accounts and ultimately disable them.

As a result, Netflix had to prompt every user to change their passwords and implement multi-factor-authentication to enhance their security.

Web scraping 

Web scraping has become a hot topic in recent years, with both hackers and nefarious data broker companies using bots to extract information from websites at scale – and often without consent. This essentially involves bots crawling web pages to extract specific data points – such as subscriber names, email addresses, product details, pricing information, and even user-generated content.

Once again, by compromising customer data in this way, the impact can include a massive loss in reputation, with businesses facing significant backlash from both customers and regulatory bodies alike.

Spam campaigns 

Everyone is well aware of spam and phishing techniques, but not everyone knows that, in order to be successful, bots are used to generate and distribute these fake emails or messages.

Every day, millions of fake emails are sent out over a short period of time, which makes it difficult for spam filters to catch them all and stop them from appearing in a user’s inbox. More target bots can also be used for spear phishing, which involves analysing social media profiles to create personalised phishing emails aimed at specific individuals.

Ad fraud 

One other cyber attack that is achieved through bots is ad fraud, which is when digital advertisements get a large amount of fake clicks or impressions to inflate the metrics, ultimately costing advertisers money without delivering any real value. The impact here is that it undermines the integrity of online advertising and significantly affects a businesses’ return on investment.

Some fraud schemes even go one step further, using bots to complete the process of purchasing or signing up for services using stolen identities or fake accounts, which subsequently defrauds both the advertiser and the consumers whose information has been compromised.

Conclusion 

Other bot-driven cyberattacks to be aware of include API abuse, account creation abuse, form submission attacks, data scraping, and ransomware delivery. All of these attacks use bots in some way, and each of them can be significantly damaging if the company has not put in the correct precautions to deal with them. Now that you know about what to expect, however, the company suffering due to malicious bot activity shouldn’t be yours.

The important step to take now is to research up-to-date bot management systems and apply them to your existing cybersecurity measures – such as firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and secure web gateways – making sure to stop them before they can cause any big issues. It’s also worth noting that there are ‘good bots’ and ‘bad bots’, so you’ll need a system that can not only recognise the difference, but work to filter the good out from the bad in order to keep your business benefitting, while also keeping it safe.