Why You Should Care About Bots

Ants and spam bots share some traits in common. Both work in groups, and both relay information to each other about the location of a food source. In both cases, you usually have what they want. However, unlike ants, bots do more than annoy: they leave malicious spam links, and more.

Intelligent behavior in machines is growing, along with the havoc they can wreak. While we aren’t in the Matrix, its estimated 61% of web traffic is attributed to bots. And many of those are malicious.

There are a few ways bad bots can affect your business:

• Annoy you by spamming your website forms
• Steal data and cause security breaches
• Bog down your site, causing poor performance and errors

If you’re not aware of or not worried about these concerns, you should definitely read a recent blog post by our friends at Port80 Software. In the post, they detail threats posed by bots, signs you may have them, and the potential consequences.

Has your site recently been bogged down by thousands of rapid requests from a distant land you do no business with? Have you been seeing spam in your form responses or comments? Are you seeing requests for pages that don’t exist on your site? If so, you may have bots.

Don’t worry, we all have bots. It’s a normal part of a site growing up. One day you’re launching, and the next day skimmers, scammers, and scrapers are scouring your site for information or holes they can poke through.

Read more…

Their post is focused on addressing bots with a Windows environment. But if you have questions, you can always reach out to us for answers specific to your organization’s site.