Bot
A bot is a computer program designed to perform repetitive tasks in an automated manner. The name 'bot' comes from the word 'robot.' Bots are based on artificial intelligence algorithms and aim to mimic human behaviors, especially in the context of online interactions.
TL;DR — what is a bot and is every bot dangerous?
A bot is an automated program performing tasks online without human interaction. Bots split into legitimate (Googlebot, customer-service chatbots, uptime monitoring) and malicious (DDoS botnets, credential stuffing, scrapers, click-fraud). According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024: 49.6% of all internet traffic is bots, and 32% are bad bots.
- What it is: scripted agent automating HTTP requests, API calls or browser interactions (headless Chrome, Puppeteer).
- How it works: emulates human behavior or executes mass operations — from 1 page/sec up to 1000+ requests/sec on a single endpoint.
- Threat vs benefit: a good bot indexes your site in Google, a bad bot steals prices, fills forms with spam or participates in a DDoS attack.
Good bots vs Bad bots vs Gray bots — comparison
| Type | Intent | Examples 2024-2026 | Legality | Block? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good bots | Beneficial for the site owner | Googlebot, Bingbot, AhrefsBot, UptimeRobot, Intercom chatbot | Legal | No (allow in robots.txt) |
| Bad bots — credential stuffing | Account takeover via leaked passwords | Custom Python/Selenium, Sentry MBA, OpenBullet | Illegal (CFAA, GDPR) | Yes (rate limit + MFA) |
| Bad bots — scrapers | Theft of prices, content, competitor data | Headless Puppeteer, Scrapy farms, residential proxies | Gray area (TOS violation) | Yes (WAF, fingerprint) |
| Bad bots — DDoS / botnet | Service overload, ransom extortion | Mirai, Mēris, Mantis, Aisuru (IoT botnets 2024-2026) | Illegal | Yes (anti-DDoS, CDN) |
| Bad bots — spam / click-fraud | Comment spam, fake ad clicks | XRumer, GSA Search Engine Ranker, ad-fraud bots | Illegal (fraud) | Yes (CAPTCHA, honeypot) |
| Bad bots — scalpers | Bulk buying of tickets, GPUs, sneakers | Cybersole, BetterNikeBot, Splashforce | Gray area (TOS violation) | Yes (queue, anti-scalping) |
| Gray bots — AI scrapers | LLM training on third-party content | GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ByteSpider | Legal but unwanted | Depends (robots.txt opt-out) |
| Gray bots — aggregators | Price comparison sites, offer aggregators | Skapiec, Ceneo, Trivago crawlers | Gray area | Depends (selective allow) |
In practice the line between bad and gray is blurred — credential-stuffing is always an attack, but price scraping by a competitor is either legitimate market intelligence (if it respects robots.txt) or IP theft (if it bypasses protections). GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are a new 2023-2026 category: legal, but many publishers block them via User-agent: GPTBot / Disallow: / in robots.txt, to avoid feeding AI models their own content for free.
Bot Definition
Bot is a computer program designed to perform repetitive tasks in an automated manner. The name “bot” comes from the word “robot.” Bots are based on artificial intelligence algorithms and aim to mimic human behaviors, especially in the context of online interactions.
Types of Bots
Bots can be divided into two main categories:
Good Bots:
- Aggregator bots - collect and analyze information from various sources
- Chatbots - conduct conversations with users
- Moderation bots - help manage content on forums and social media
Malicious Bots:
- Spam bots - send unwanted messages
- DDoS bots (Zombies) - participate in denial-of-service attacks
- Ad fraud bots - generate fake advertising traffic
How Do Bots Work?
Bots operate based on programmed algorithms that allow them to:
- Automatically perform repetitive tasks
- Analyze data and make decisions based on it
- Interact with users or systems in ways that mimic human behavior
- Learn and improve their functions based on gathered experience
Bot Applications in Cybersecurity
In the cybersecurity context, bots have both positive and negative applications:
Positive:
- Monitoring networks for anomalies and potential threats
- Automating processes related to incident response
- Supporting security log and alert analysis
Negative:
- Creating botnets for DDoS attacks
- Spreading malware
- Automating phishing attacks
Threats Associated with Bots
- DDoS attacks - using botnets to overload systems
- Data theft - bots can be used to steal confidential information
- Spam and phishing - automatic sending of unwanted or malicious messages
- Public opinion manipulation - using bots in social media to influence online discussions
Methods for Detecting and Defending Against Malicious Bots
- Behavioral analysis - detecting unusual behavior patterns
- Using CAPTCHA systems - distinguishing humans from bots
- Implementing advanced firewalls and IPS/IDS systems
- Regular software and system updates
- User education on threat recognition
Is Googlebot a bot, and how do you tell it apart from an impostor crawler?
Yes — Googlebot is a bot: the crawler that fetches pages for Google Search’s index. That is exactly why malicious bots like to announce themselves as Googlebot in the User-Agent header, hoping nobody will block “the search engine”. The User-Agent header proves nothing, though, because the client sets it. Google’s documentation for site owners describes two ways to check whether a request really came from its crawler:
- DNS check (manual, for individual addresses). Take the IP address from your server logs and run a reverse DNS lookup on it, e.g. with the
hostcommand. The returned name must end ingooglebot.com,google.comorgoogleusercontent.com. Then run a normal (forward) DNS lookup on that name — it must resolve to the same IP address you saw in the log. Only a match in both directions confirms the origin. - Comparison with the published address list (automatic, for high traffic). Google publishes the IP ranges of its crawlers as JSON files, separately for common crawlers such as Googlebot (
common-crawlers.json), special-case crawlers and user-triggered fetchers — you match the address from the log against the right list.
The split matters for robots.txt. Google’s common crawlers always obey its rules, special-case crawlers (e.g. AdsBot) may not, and fetchers triggered on a user’s request ignore them. So robots.txt is a request, not a control — it only stops bots that choose to honour it.
In a business, the filtering happens at the edge of the application: a WAF with a bot protection module lets search engines and monitoring tools through while stopping malicious traffic. One example is FortiWeb, a web application firewall with bot protection: the vendor states that it blocks malicious bots without cutting off the ones a business needs, including search engine crawlers and availability and performance monitoring tools.
How can you tell whether you are talking to a bot?
Chatbots in online shops and voicebots on helplines now handle simple requests: they check a parcel’s status or book an appointment and pass harder cases to a human agent (as Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs describes them). The person on the other end does not always know there is no human there. Two signals help:
- Disclosure by the provider. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act, Article 50(1)) requires providers to build AI systems meant for direct conversation with people in a way that lets users know they are dealing with an AI system — unless that is obvious to a reasonably well-informed, observant person. A fairly deployed assistant therefore introduces itself as automated. The absence of such a notice does not prove you are talking to a human, however: fraudsters ignore the rules, and social media bots are built to pass as people.
- An off-script test. Ask something that is not on the usual menu of requests, or refer back to something said a few messages earlier. A helpline bot will usually fall back on stock phrases or hand you over to a human agent, because it only handles the requests it was prepared for.
If your company is the one deploying a customer assistant, plan the transparency obligation from the start, together with the scope of data the chatbot can access — see what a secure AI deployment with data access control looks like.
Ethical Aspects of Bot Use
- Transparency - informing users about interaction with a bot
- Privacy protection - ensuring that bots do not violate user privacy
- Responsibility - defining responsibility for bot actions
- Honesty - avoiding the use of bots for manipulation or fraud
Future of Bots in Cybersecurity Context
- Development of more advanced AI-based bots
- Increasing role of bots in security process automation
- Evolution of defense methods against malicious bots
- Potential use of bots in advanced cyberattacks
In summary, bots are a powerful tool that can be used both to improve security and to conduct attacks. Understanding how they work and implementing appropriate protection measures against malicious bots is key, while leveraging the potential of good bots in cybersecurity.
Related Terms
- Botnet - network of infected bot-devices controlled by a C2 server
- DDoS - volumetric attacks most often launched from botnets
- Trojan - malware that infects a device and recruits it into a botnet
- Phishing - bots automate mass phishing campaigns
- Spam - bot-driven spam in comments, forms, mailings
- Malware - umbrella category for malicious software
- Artificial Intelligence - technology powering chatbots and AI scrapers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot)
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Frequently asked questions
+ What is a bot in simple terms?
A bot (short for "robot") is an automated software program that performs repetitive tasks on the internet without human interaction — faster, more accurately and more cheaply than a user. Bots talk to servers over HTTP/API, emulate browsers (headless Chrome, Puppeteer, Playwright) or application interfaces. In practice they split into **legitimate** (Googlebot indexing pages, customer-service chatbots, uptime monitors, QA tools) and **malicious** (DDoS botnets, credential-stuffing, price scrapers, fake-engagement on social media, email spam). According to the Imperva Bad Bot Report 2024: **49.6% of all internet traffic is bots**, of which **32% is bad bots** — more than 1 in 3 visits to your site are not humans.
+ What are the main types of bots?
Bots split into three intent classes: (1) **Good bots** — Googlebot, Bingbot, AhrefsBot, SemrushBot (SEO crawlers), customer-service chatbots (Intercom, Drift, Tidio), uptime monitoring bots (Pingdom, UptimeRobot), fact-checking bots, archive.org Wayback. (2) **Bad bots** — credential-stuffing bots (test leaked passwords), price and content scrapers, scalpers (buy tickets / GPUs in bulk), spam bots (comments, signups), click-fraud bots (generate fake ad traffic), fake-engagement bots (artificial likes, followers). (3) **Gray bots** — comparison-shopping aggregators, AI scrapers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot — ethical gray area: legal, but often unwanted), SEO research bots on third-party sites. Per Imperva classification: Good 17.6%, Bad 32%, Gray ~ remainder.
+ Is a bot the same as a virus or malware?
No — a bot is **neutral technology**, malware is a **category of intent**. The fact that a program is automated does not make it malicious (Googlebot is a bot but not malware). However, a specific bot **can be part of malware** — for example a trojan-bot that infects a computer and adds it to a DDoS botnet. Differences: **Bot** = automated program (any intent). **Virus** = self-replicating code that infects files. **Trojan** = malware that disguises itself as a legitimate program. **Botnet** = network of infected devices remotely controlled by an attacker (C2 server). A single zombie in a botnet is both a bot (automation) and malware (malicious intent). In short: every malware-bot is a bot, but not every bot is malware.
+ How do I detect a malicious bot on a website?
Signals of bot traffic: (1) **Anomalous timing patterns** — exactly every X seconds, no randomness, no idle time, requests at night from a mismatched timezone. (2) **User-Agent string** — empty, generic ("python-requests/2.x", "curl/7.x"), inconsistent with declared OS. (3) **No JS execution** — bot does not execute JavaScript, does not load analytics, does not generate canvas fingerprint. (4) **Headless browser flags** — `navigator.webdriver = true`, missing plugins, anomalous screen.width. (5) **Mouse and scroll telemetry** — bot moves the mouse linearly or not at all, scrolls in jumps. (6) **Impossible metrics** — 100 pages in 5 seconds, perfect conversion rate, 0% bounce. (7) **IP from datacenter / VPN / Tor** — AWS, DigitalOcean, known proxy pools. Detection tools: **Cloudflare Bot Management**, **DataDome**, **PerimeterX (HUMAN)**, **reCAPTCHA Enterprise**, **Akamai Bot Manager** — combine fingerprinting, behavioral analysis and ML.
+ How do I protect a business against malicious bots?
Multi-layer defense: (1) **WAF + Bot Management** — Cloudflare, AWS WAF, Akamai, F5 Distributed Cloud — block known bot signatures and suspicious patterns. (2) **Rate limiting** on login endpoints (5 attempts / minute / IP), signup, API. (3) **CAPTCHA / Turnstile / hCaptcha** for suspicious requests (not all — UX killer). (4) **Device fingerprinting** — FingerprintJS, ThreatMetrix — identifies a returning bot even after IP change. (5) **MFA + passkeys** on all accounts — credential stuffing stops working. (6) **Honeypot fields** in forms (hidden fields that only bots fill in). (7) **Behavioral biometrics** — mouse / keystroke timing analysis. (8) **IP reputation feeds** (Spamhaus, AbuseIPDB, Spur). (9) **Bot-traffic monitoring in GA4 / logs** — alert when >50% of traffic comes from one IP/ASN. For e-commerce: **anti-scalping** layers (queue systems, randomized drops). For SaaS: block signups from disposable email, verify phone.
+ What does bot mean?
"Bot" is short for "robot". It means a program that performs actions in place of a person — automatically, following programmed rules. The meaning depends on context: in search it is a crawler that indexes pages (e.g. Googlebot), in customer service a chatbot or voicebot, in online games a program that controls a character instead of a player, and in cybersecurity often malware that pulls an infected device into a botnet. The word itself says nothing about intent — whether a bot is welcome depends on what it does and whether it follows the rules of the site.