Hackers are people just like you and me. The only difference is a few of their synapses snapped and they set out to make our life miserable. Some tricks are perpetrated, perhaps to get even for some imagined slight. Others because the hackers are learning coding and bots are a new game, and others just because they can.
What happens is the merry-go-round we create when innocently opening a mail from them. Perhaps sharing an image with an ugly bit of malware attached. Bet, if you are honest, you have found this cool picture and downloaded it to your computer.
Did you run the img through your updated professional security before opening it? Probably not. The tendency is to think it comes from an honorable place so it must be fine. Did you check to make sure it is not copyrighted and your right to public use?
Last week 10khits4unow was paid a visit by a hacker spammer. The damage done was via email. Tens of thousands of annoying email messages sent out inviting search engine blacklisting. Suffice it to say it struck a serious cord about what we all are facing using the Internet. And that is bots are here to stay.
The Criminal Element
Bots and Botnets are commonly associated with cyber criminals out to steal data, identities, credit card numbers and worse.
Broadly speaking, a bot is any computer program that runs automated tasks. Take the Google bot. It scurries around the net checking out website pages collecting information for searchers to find. This one, along with Alexa, are good bots that are familiar to us. The crawlers and spider bots we hope pay our websites a visit often.
Scraper Bots
Cheeky spam bots that crawl the web searching out email addresses with full spam purposes. Others search for twitter handles, blog comment fields and any other method of contact into which they can pump spam.
The worst feeders to these attacker bots can be you, the person who understands how very sensitive your passwords can be. Yet you spread private information openly across the many chats to the many bots waiting in hiding just for you.
Good Bots and Bad Bots Online
They not only outnumber us, but account for 61.5% of all internet traffic. Now that is scary news. This shift in traffic signifies two things. One an increase in automated traffic, as ecommerce increases their competitive search methods. And that leads to the bad bots out to skim information and infiltrate data bases and computers everywhere.
Incapsula Blog provides an informative article on the top 10 Bots you should know about. It’s a small world that grows mightily large when you realize China, Russia and France play a very big role in data management.
How does this all affect you? The more you know, the easier it is to work with the right ones. Then find a way to block dangerous bots without closing the door on the very bots you need to support your efforts.
Fran Klasinski-warriorlady
Mentoring you with common sense
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