Malicious bots in 2024: What are they and how can they be prevented

What exactly are ‘malicious bots’

This includes spreading false information on the internet, engaging in coordinated social media campaigns to skew public perception, and massing together to inflate follower counts similarly manipulating an online image. These bots are harder to detect, given that most mimic human behavior, but they’re not as immediately threatening to your company as a malicious bot might be. 

The primary focus of malicious bots is to cause direct harm, whether that’s to individuals, systems, or organizations like yours. This can involve sending out large volumes of email spam, attempting to gain unauthorized access to accounts, overwhelming servers with traffic and causing them to crash, and extracting large amounts of data without permission. These actions not only disrupt operations but also pose significant challenges to enterprise data protection, potentially compromising sensitive information and violating privacy regulations.

Compared to malign bots, they are relatively straightforward but cut-throat, deadly, and efficient in executing attacks that disrupt entire businesses. This is why bot detection has become such a must in 2024, especially considering their persistent growth.

The 2024 threat field

Just last year, the number of bot attacks nearly doubled, with a staggering increase of 32% by the end of 2023. December, specifically, stood out as the most active month, with 1.77 billion blocked bot attacks in total. 

According to Victor Zyamzin, the Chief Business Officer at Qrator Labs, we’re only going to ‘see more bot attacks in 2024’, and these will take a variety of different forms. One of the most common at the moment is the launching of DDOS attacks, which involves flooding a server with internet traffic and causing it to crash rendering it unusable for customers and leading to lost revenue and damaged reputation. This is incredibly dangerous for all companies, especially cloud computing businesses, but there are many more to be aware of.

Bot-driven threats in 2024

Some of the most prevalent types of malicious bot attacks other than DDOS observed so far in 2024 include:

Account takeovers

These occur when automated bots gain access to user accounts, steal sensitive information, make fraudulent transactions, and then using those accounts to launch further attacks.

Online fraud

Malicious bots can also be automated to deceive and manipulate online systems and users, for that matter for financial gain, executing fraudulent activities including credit card fraud. This was well publicized on ‘X’ just a couple of months ago when numerous victims came forward about ‘moneyback’ scam bots. 

Web scraping

Another malicious activity performed by bots is web scraping, whereby bots are used to scrape large amounts of data from websites while targeting pricing information and user data. Anthropic AI, for instance, has been a serious cause for concern for businesses in 2024, especially considering the rate of multiplication and the ineffectiveness in killing them off.

How to protect your company from a bot attack

Knowing about these bot-driven threats and how they differ, however, is the first step to protecting your business from future bot attacks. There are a number of solutions, after all. Rate limiting, for instance, is a technique that restricts the number of requests a user or bot can make to a server within a specific time frame making it a significant defense mechanism against DDOS. 

As well as this, CAPTCHAs can work to differentiate human users from bots, with invisible CAPTCHAs working to track user interactions like mouse movements to detect bots without disrupting the overall user experience. 

In terms of an alternative to CAPTCHA, IP blocking is another method that can be quite effective working to block IP addresses associated with malicious bot activity and honeypots can trap bots with hidden form fields that legitimate users wouldn’t interact with.  These solutions can all work to detect bots and mitigate against them, but it’s up to your company to initiate them first. With the rise of malicious bots unlikely to stop anytime soon, it’s never been more important that you do.

Conclusion

While malicious bots will likely remain a formidable challenge in the years ahead, a united effort can help to mitigate their most harmful effects and create a safer, more trustworthy online ecosystem for all. The stakes could not be higher, as the integrity of our digital infrastructure, economy, and democracy hang in the balance.