What exactly is a bot, and how do they work?

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What is a bot?

A bot, short for robot and also known as an internet bot, is a computer program that acts as an agent for another program or simulates a human activity. Bots are typically used to automate specific tasks, which means they can run without specific human instructions. 

A bot can be used by an organization or an individual to replace a repetitive task that a human would otherwise have to perform. Bots are also much faster than humans at these tasks. Bots can perform useful functions, but they can also be malicious and in the form of malware. 

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How do bots function? 

Bots are made up of algorithms that help them perform their assigned tasks. These tasks include conversing with a human and mimicking human behaviors, as well as gathering content from other websites. Bots come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are designed to perform a wide range of tasks. 

A chatbot, for example, operates in one of several ways. A rule-based chatbot interacts with a person by presenting predefined prompts for that person to choose from. Machine learning is used by an intellectually independent chatbot to learn from human inputs and scan for valuable keywords that can trigger an interaction. Artificial intelligence chatbots are a hybrid of rule-based and cognitively autonomous chatbots. Pattern matching, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation tools may also be used by chatbots.  

Bot management software can help organizations or individuals manage bots and protect against malicious bots. A web app security platform may also include bot managers. A bot manager can allow the use of certain bots while prohibiting the use of others that could harm a system. A bot manager does this by classifying all incoming requests from humans, good bots, known malicious bots, and unknown bots. The bot manager then directs any suspect bot traffic away from a site. IP rate limiting and CAPTCHAs are two fundamental bot management feature sets. IP rate limiting limits the number of requests for the same address, whereas CAPTCHAs provide challenges that aid in differentiation. IP rate limiting restricts the number of same address requests, while CAPTCHAs provide challenges that help differentiate bots from humans. 

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There are various types of bots, each with its own set of goals and tasks. The following are examples of common bots:

  • Chatbots. These programs can simulate human-to-human conversations. Eliza, an NLP program developed in 1966 as a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project, was one of the first and most famous chatbots prior to the web. This chatbot pretended to be a psychotherapist and responded to questions with questions. Virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Assistant, are more recent examples of chatbots. 
  • Transactional bots. These bots are intended to automate tasks that would otherwise be performed by a human over the phone, such as blocking a stolen credit card or confirming a bank's operating hours. 
  • Social bots. These bots, often considered opinion bots, influence discussions with users on social media platforms. 
  • Shopbot. Many of these programs search the web for the best price on a product that a user is interested in purchasing. Other shopbots, such as the Shopify chatbot, help Shopify store owners automate marketing and customer service. 
  • Knowbots. These programs gather information for a user by visiting websites and retrieving information that meets certain criteria. Originally, knowbots were used as computerized assistants that performed redundant tasks.  
  • Spiders or crawlers. Also known as web crawlers, these bots access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, such as Google and Bing. 
  • Monitoring bots. These can be used to monitor the health of a website or system. 
  • Web scraping crawlers. These are similar to crawlers in that they collect data and extract relevant content from web pages. 
What are Malicious bots?

Malicious bots are used to automate cybercrime-related actions. The following are examples of malicious bots: 

  • Denial-of-service or distributed DoS bots, which overload a server's resources and prevent the service from operating;
  • Spambots, which post promotional content to drive traffic to a specific website; and
  • Hackers, which distribute malware, attack websites and gather sensitive information, such as financial data -- bots created by hackers can also open backdoors to install more serious malware and worms.
Advantages and disadvantages of bots

There are numerous benefits to using bots, as well as drawbacks, such as the risks that other bots may pose. The following are some of the potential benefits of bots:

  • Faster than humans at repetitive tasks;
  • Time saved for customers and clients;
  • Available 24/7;
  • Organizations can reach large numbers of people via messenger apps;
  • customizable; 
  • Improved user experience.

Some disadvantages include the following:

  • Cannot be set to perform some exact tasks and risk misunderstanding users;
  • Humans are still necessary to manage the bots, as well as to step in if one misinterprets another human;
  • Can be made malicious by users;
  • Can be used for spam.

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