When Artificial intelligence is in the rage, every business wants to implement some intelligence in its business. You must have encountered those popped up chat bots asking you for your query immediately you landed on a website. Technically a script or program to perform simple repetitive tasks, internet bots are intended to do things simple and faster for a business.

Surprisingly these bots comprise 50% activities on the internet. However, there is also the evil side of every creativity, and that’s true for this technology too. As per statistics, 66% of bots traffic is for malicious purpose. Indeed a cyber security concern!

Hence, whether you are using an artificial intelligence bot for your website or encountering it through other sites, it may affect your purpose or business! In the next sections we will try to get some insights in it.

Good bots vs. Bad bots and technology behind it

Good artificial intelligence bots have many usabilities and positive sides like –

• -Search engine operation. For example: Googlebot.

• -Powering API

• -Scanning for vulnerability

• -Monitoring sites

On the contrary, bad bots are responsible for malicious activities. Maybe today’s advanced technology is one of the prime reason for it. Internet bots were developed initially using Python or Perl scripts.

However, over the period these languages have also evolved, and today they have reached a magnitude where you can mimic human behavior through bots developed by these scripts. Hence, passing an internet bot as a legitimate user is not a big issue now.

Secondly, with the support of JavaScript, cookies can push a significant increase of browser-based bots. These types of artificial intelligence bots ultimately work as malware and attack user’s computer. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) bots are the prime example of it.

Another notable side effect is it increases the loading time of your website. Because a significant amount of traffic is generated through the internet bots deployed on your site itself. Hence, at a given point in time, if your site receives too much of traffic, the performance will slow down automatically. The result is poor customer experience and finally loss of revenue.

In the next section, we will look into some specific bad bots and how they impact business as a whole.

Read more – Top 15 Chatbot platforms revolutionizing the business world

Types of Artificial intelligence Bad Bots and its business impacts

DDoS:

As mentioned earlier it’s a type of malware which intentionally causes temporary suspension of a network service. This malware attack is termed as botnet attack where a botnet is a group of hijacked devices connected through the internet. The result is a high volume of traffic which ultimately affect website performance as having mentioned in the above section.

This kind of malware attack not only affects a business short term or long term but also creates bad brand reputation while not able to serve customers as per their expectation.

Site scraping:

As the name suggests this type of bot is responsible for scraping the vital information from a website. It affects the database of a site and adversely affects the site owner.

Spy bots:

This particular type of artificial intelligence bots are very intelligently designed and probably the most dreaded type of cyber security concern. They mine crucial information like email, financial information, contact numbers of a user to sell it to other users.

Download bots:

Have you recently faced an issue of unwanted redirection to unintended sites? It may be for those tricky download bots try to fraudulently increase the number of an app download.

Comment spam:

Most of the business run their blogs today as content marketing which is another way of better ranking in Google. These artificial intelligence bots affect a blog’s or site’s comment section and somehow try to inject links in those sections. Their target is to lure your readers which ultimately will affect your site performance. Besides that, your system too will be vulnerable due to it.

SEO referral spam:

This is another fraudulent way to increase site traffic of the spammer. As a site owner, the business may be offered a free download option from the spam site which is intended for their marketing campaign. Through the download, the spammer will run the bots from website owners system by safely undetected it from IP blacklisting.

Next, it will keep visiting various sites using the site owner’s IP address. This was they can boost their own SEO rating. However, the actual site owner’s SEO performance may degrade, even it results in removal and blacklisting from Google. In addition to that, this type of bot can harm analytic data too.

Conclusion:

To secure a business, controlling such annoying bad bots are essential. The simplest way could be implementing firewalls. However, an in-depth analysis may be the more effective solution for it. Using static analysis tool, CAPTCHA or linking it to JavaScript, Chrome or MSIE are the various ways to implement such solutions.

Please share your valuable inputs in comment area to make the article more informative.