Ever heard of a DDoS attack? A Distributed Denial-of-Service attack is a malicious attack that disrupts your website’s regular traffic. How? A network of bots, a botnet, releases a massive amount of traffic to your website, causing it to crash, at the very least. Scary right? But DDoS attacks belong to a much larger group — the bot attacks.
From their early days, bots have been a great help to us with automating manual digital labor. But every useful technology can cause a disaster at the hands of the wrong people. That’s why the whole concept of bot attacks exists.
No website owner or company is ever safe from bot attacks. So, it’s best to be as educated as possible. In this article, we’ll talk about what bot attacks are, their types, their effects, and how to prevent them.
What Is a Bot Attack?
The term bot, short for robot, refers to a program or script that automates specific tasks. It has been used in the context of computer security for many years.
Bot attacks are malicious automated tasks and series of requests submitted to your website, application, or API. Apart from the persons initiating the act, there are no direct human involvements in a bot attack.
On a bigger scale, the attackers use botnets. Here, a network of bots and devices is used to perform coordinated attacks on a target system or network. Each infected device acts as a bot controlled remotely by the attacker, typically without the knowledge or consent of its owner.
A viral example of bot attacks and botnets is the Mirai botnet. In 2016, a large-scale DDoS attack caused disruption in online platforms like Spotify, Reddit, and Twitter. The Mirai botnet is the work of just three people. It deactivated Minecraft servers and made more money off the popular online game. During the process, however, they released the Mirai codes online, causing several other dangerous bot attacks.
How Is a Bot Attack Shaped and Why?
Depending on the platform and the target, bots can be built in different ways: as a desktop app, a browser, a so-called “headless browser,” different programming languages, etc. The usual culprits behind the creation of malicious bots are cybercriminals and malicious hackers.
For web-specific bots, the process often involves the combination of a headless browser like Chromium and an automation framework like Puppeteer or Playwright. A malware infection can be the first stage in creating different types of botnets. Attackers may use malware like a Trojan horse to infect a target device. Once infected, the device becomes part of the botnet and can be controlled by the attacker.
Exploiting vulnerabilities can help target a specific website or network. Attackers may exploit known vulnerabilities in software or hardware to gain access to a system or network. Once inside, they can plant malware and begin building botnets.
5 Types of Bot Attacks Newsletter Operators Must Recognize
Bots can perform a large variety of attacks, which makes this a huge topic to discuss. Here are some of the most common attack types that we have been dealing with in the past year:
Spammers
These bots are responsible for spam attacks through emails, comments, links, and a large variety of other content that can damage a brand’s reputation. Marketing via emails, in particular, can affect email deliverability and domain reputation, messing up your metrics, if not your whole business. On a large scale, botnets can be used to send large volumes of spam emails that can deliver malware, phishing scams, or other types of attacks.
Scrapers
You probably have heard of Search Engine Crawlers that Google and its rivals use to read web content. Scrapers are like that, but more focused and trained with malicious intent. They will grab your content and index, post, or use it as they desire. This will consume your bandwidth and potentially damage your SEO, too. Scrapers use botnets to automate data collection from websites, which can be used for various purposes such as market research, price monitoring, or even stealing sensitive information.
Fraudsters
These bot attacks interfere with activities such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads and affiliate programs, even affecting cloud server resources like bandwidth. This is the most damaging type of bot attack, as fraudsters click, download, use, and literally consume and benefit!
This type of bot attack has a few subtypes, such as financial fraudster bots and bots focused on stealing personal information. If you have payments on your website, you will definitely encounter fake orders and fake payments, leaving you with a lot of cleanup to do.
Disruptors
This type of bot attack simply disrupts the operations of your site or service, either for financial or reputational damage or simply out of malice, without any specific reason. DDoS bots are classified as disruptors.
Clicker Bots
Recent findings show that not all of the clicks on your newsletter emails are from your readers. Clickers are non-malicious. They are security bots that protect against phishing attacks. But they can also inflate newsletter click rates, leading to inaccurate engagement data. Finding out how much of your click-through rates may be challenging at this point. Read to the end of the article to find more information about this newly uncovered threat to your newsletter analytics.
The Importance of Defending Against Bots
According to Cloudflare, the biggest bot attack happened in 2017. It was a DDoS attack targeting Google services. The attack resulted in an incoming traffic burst of 2.54 terabits per second (Tbps). Although the attackers had done many other DDoS attacks at Google, this was by far the most extreme.
When discussing bot attacks, we are not just talking website downtime. From what you read in the previous section, you already know that bot attacks can be personal, reputational, or even fraud or theft. There is no doubt that bot attacks and malicious botnets are dangerous. The question is, how exactly do they affect us?
Here are some of the repercussions a company can face if they ignore the bot attacks threat:
- Manipulated and inaccurate data: bot attacks can manipulate all your metrics.
- Financial loss: Bot attacks can cause financial losses to a business through various means, such as stealing sensitive data, engaging in fraudulent activities, or disrupting the site’s operations. Let’s say a bot attack disrupts the site’s availability or functionality. That can result in lost revenue due to decreased sales or user abandonment.
- Reputation damage: A successful bot attack can damage a business’s reputation and erode user trust. For example, if a bot attack results in user data being stolen or compromised, users may lose confidence in the business’s ability to keep their data safe.
- Legal and regulatory compliance issues: Depending on the nature of the bot attacks and the industry in which the business operates, a bot attack could result in legal and regulatory compliance issues. For example, if a bot attack compromises sensitive data such as credit card information, the business could be liable for any resulting damage or fines.
- Operational disruption: Bot attacks can disrupt a business’s operations by causing downtime or system failures. This can impact employee productivity, customer service, and overall business performance.
Simple bot attacks originate from simple bots and can be countered considering the type of bot, the method they are using, and the volume. On the other hand, mega attacks come from complex bots and have many different origins (botnets), methods, and volumes.
Complex bots can act as real humans and are hard to detect. They will change the network, method, and fingerprint. With this in mind, they can submit thousands of spam in a single hour and damage your entire list. They can consume your resources and create a DDOS attack as well. These bot attacks can be challenging to detect and prevent, as the compromised devices often appear as legitimate users.
So how can such threats be faced?
Preventing Bot Attacks
In terms of precautionary measures, there are many steps that site owners can take to mitigate the risk of bot attacks. Here are a few highly-noted examples:
- Implement security protocols: Sites should use security protocols such as HTTPS and two-factor authentication to protect against unauthorized access.
- Keep software up to date: Sites should ensure that all software and systems are updated with the latest security patches to prevent known vulnerabilities from being exploited.
- Use web application firewalls: Web application firewalls can help detect and prevent bot attacks by monitoring incoming traffic and identifying suspicious patterns.
- Limit access: Sites should limit access to sensitive information and functionality to authorized users only.
- Implement rate limiting: Sites can implement rate limiting to prevent bots from making too many requests or trying to brute-force login credentials.
- Monitor traffic: Sites should monitor traffic patterns to identify suspicious behavior, such as sudden spikes in traffic or patterns of repeated requests.
- Train employees: Employees should be trained on security best practices, such as avoiding phishing scams and recognizing and reporting suspicious activity.
How We Deal With Bot Attacks at Refact
At Refact, we have clients with medium-to-large website traffic. As a result, deciding on the right plan sometimes gets tricky and has its challenges.
An example of attacks we deal with are spam subscriptions and fraudulent orders. The importance of paying attention to the bots is that sometimes cleaning up is super hard. Fake subscribers can clog any media company’s tech stack or skew their analytics. We have also dealt with bots that use stolen credit cards to place fake orders. Imagine having 300 orders in a single day that you should detect, cancel, and refund!
To detect the attack type, we look into the type of bot and method they are using as well as the volume of the attack. If you’re facing the same problems, book a session with us, and let’s go over your bot attack problems. Now, let’s review a simple spam attack we deal with in the day-to-day life of our development and support teams:
An Example Case
Imagine you have a sign-up form integrated with Sailthru or any other ESP. Spam emails are signing up. Depending on the type and volume, these are some of the issues that need to be dealt with:
- The emails are valid, meaning that the email address belongs to an actual person, containing an inbox and every other aspect an email should have. Consider someone signing up your email to a newsletter without your consent. Most email validators, from specialized to ESP-integrated, will fail to detect them.
- Website protections like Google reCAPTCHA, Honeypots, and Fingerprinting are not working.
- The attack bots change the IP, frequency, device, etc., to send spam emails.
Here are the precautions we implement to defend against different types of botnets and bot attacks:
- Simple Bot Attacks
The bot sends spam emails but only at a small volume. It signs different emails with a detectable signature and a known source. They are usually blocked by a layer of protection on the website and network, and you won’t see any spam on your end.
- Mega Bot Attacks
The bot is sending emails at a medium volume. Few are occurring on the ST list. Different emails, sources, and signatures are detectable through analysis. Some requests are blocked by the layers we put on the website and the network, and some pass through. We develop a feature or will set up a medium security plan (using third-party services) to monitor and block them for good.
- Complex Bot Attacks
The bot is sending emails at a large volume. Most are occurring on the ST list. Different emails, sources, time periods, signatures, and behavior. These bots mostly use AI to bypass protections, captchas, browser signatures, etc. To block these types of bots, you need an advanced protection plan that may end up costing more.
How Clicking Bots Are Skewing Newsletter Analytics
Newsletter click rates are being significantly skewed by bot clicks. Reports from Inbox Collective revealed unusually high click rates in newsletters, with investigations showing that a large percentage of these clicks were from bots, not humans. The amount of impact on CTR rates is hard to gauge. One platform identified 63% of clicks as bot-generated, while another reported only 5% – still a significant number.
These bots aren’t malicious; they’re designed to protect inboxes from threats like phishing attacks. However, their actions inadvertently inflate newsletter click rates, misleading newsletter operators about actual reader engagement.
The inflated click rates affect newsletters’ advertising strategies, as analytics obviously guides business decisions. Of course, clicker bots are not the only factor skewing open rates. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, which automatically opens emails, is another reason your analytics may be inaccurate.
With 3rd-party cookies being deprecated in 2024, and bots getting smarter with AI, distinguishing human behavior is harder than ever. At Refact, we have been exploring innovative ways of recognizing and filtering bot-generated data to help newsletters and publishers. You can read about that in our article on email deliverability, where we present a relevant case study from the Hustle.
Is There Still a Risk, Even With Protection in Place?
Unfortunately, there is always a risk of bot attacks happening. Attackers are constantly evolving their techniques and developing new ways to bypass security measures. So, no security can be considered entirely foolproof. Some bot attacks may also be difficult to detect, mainly the ones that use machine learning to mimic human behavior.
That said, taking proactive measures to prevent bot attacks can significantly reduce the risk of an attack occurring and limit the damage an attack can cause. Implementing a multi-layered security approach that includes regular monitoring, detection, and mitigation, as well as keeping software up to date, educating users, and using security tools, can help businesses minimize the risks associated with bot attacks. If you are experiencing suspicious behavior (like sudden spikes in traffic or subscriber numbers), you can rely on us for help. Simply contact us by scheduling an appointment.
