There is one extremely common threat to our security that nearly everyone has witnessed but hardly anyone talks about – bad bots. These silent attackers are often thought of as annoying spam accounts posting computer-generated comments online. They are so common that most of us tend to scroll by them without noticing, but in reality, bad bots are much more dangerous, particularly for business owners.

What Are Bad Bots?

Bad bots are software applications that are programmed to run automated tasks with malicious intent, such as brute force attacks, data mining, ad fraud and more. These stealthy assailants are the tireless, automated “employees” of cybercriminals that help them wreak havoc at scale. And they are everywhere. A study by Imperva revealed that of all Internet traffic in 2022, 47.4% was made up of these automated bots.

The activities of these bad bots can range from annoying to outright malicious. The most common ones we see that can affect any business are:

Reputation Attacks: Bots can be configured to leave comments on your social media or website with malicious codes and links, post provocative or spammy comments, leave scathing reviews and so on, all of which affect consumer trust.

Web Scraping: Bad bots can scrape your website for valuable data, such as pricing information or customer reviews, which they might use for various purposes, including undercutting your prices or selling your data to competitors. They could also use it to duplicate your website and set up phishing scams to trick visitors.

This can be particularly dangerous for industries with sensitive data, like health care. Bots can scrape sensitive health information, such as patient records, medical history and insurance information, which is often later sold on the dark web for profit.

Brute Force Attacks: These bots attempt to gain unauthorized access to your systems by repeatedly guessing passwords, making your accounts vulnerable to breaches. This is a popular tactic against financial services companies. If cybercriminals get access to accounts that contain sensitive financial information, they can open up new credit card accounts.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: Bad bots can be used to launch DDoS attacks, overwhelming your website or online services with traffic and causing downtime.

Ad Fraud: Some bots engage in click fraud, repeatedly clicking on online ads to deplete your advertising budget without delivering real human engagement. This will skew analytics and often lead to poor decision-making for the marketing department.

Detecting bad bots can be challenging since they often mimic human behavior. The hardest ones to identify are evasive bots, which get their name from their ability to sidestep security by cycling through random IPs, rapidly changing their identities, mimicking human behavior and defeating CAPTCHA challenges. However, there are a few methods to help you identify bad bot attacks:

Watch Traffic Patterns: Monitor website traffic patterns for irregularities, such as high traffic from a single IP address or a single region.

Monitor All Comments Sections: Check in regularly on social media sites for spam comments or fake bad reviews and delete them.

Use CAPTCHA Challenges: Implement CAPTCHA challenges or bot detection tools to filter out automated traffic automatically.

Implement Anomaly Detection: Use anomaly detection algorithms to spot unusual behavior, like rapid data scraping or suspicious login attempts.

Track Bot Signatures: Maintain a list of known bot signatures and compare incoming traffic against it.

If you notice repeated issues, there are a few actions you can take, such as:

Educate Your Team: Train your employees to recognize and report suspicious activities, as humans are often the first line of defense. Create a process that includes who to notify and what steps to take when each issue is noticed.

Use Bot Detection Solutions: Invest in bot detection software or services that can help identify and block bad bot traffic.

Maintain Regular Updates: Keep your software and security systems updated to patch vulnerabilities that bots may exploit.

Implement Rate Limiting: Limit the number of requests an IP address can make in a given time frame to thwart scraping attempts.

Hire An IT Professional: Bots are tricky. IT companies deal with them regularly and have advanced solutions that can help eliminate these annoying and dangerous issues for you.

The impact of bad bots on business owners can be significant and lead to financial losses, reputational damage and legal complications. If you’re worried about bad bots causing a problem for your organization, schedule a FREE Discovery Call and we’ll help figure out where your company is vulnerable and how you can protect yourself and your business today. Click here to book now.

It’s a special kind of relentless attack all business owners and managers face: the persistent, crazy, chaotic assault on your time and attention. Seems like business productivity is never what it can be? No one is immune, and every business deals with it. 

Some leaders handle the constant pressure on their attention brilliantly, keeping the team organized and highly productive. But most people struggle with this and feel crushed and overwhelmed by all the things they have to keep track of and do. This goes double if your business is in growth mode and not “standing still” or casually strolling through its existence.

Add to this a remote workforce, and it can be intensely difficult to wrap your head around all the projects, to-dos, deadlines and client deliverables you and your leadership team must manage.

While we as an IT and Managed Services company cannot tell you what projects are most important, we can absolutely help you and your team stay far more organized and allow you to know if the people on your team are properly aligned, prioritizing the right work and focused on the things you want them to focus on. We can also help you organize communication to lessen the chances of a dropped ball or a communication failure, which is by far the #1 reason why problems happen in business.

One of the tools we recommend to clients wanting to get more operational control and clearer communication is Microsoft Teams. There are a lot of reasons why this is a “super tool” for productivity and organizational alignment, but as a bonus, it typically ends up saving our clients quite a bit of money on technology, because it replaces other applications, like Slack, Zoom and dozens of popular project management software, putting all of it into one lower-cost, more secure and more tightly integrated system.

Let me share just a few of the cool features you’ll love in Teams. Keep in mind that this list is far from complete. Microsoft Teams has over 1,900 applications you can pick from to integrate into a Teams Channel to organize information, workflow, tasks, deadlines and documents.

Posts: The “post” feature works a lot like Slack in that it will allow you to post questions, reminders and status updates to everyone on that Team regarding that project. This not only keeps ALL communication for a project in one place, but it creates a history and alerts everyone on the team to what’s going on. This feature saves a lot of money for companies using Slack since it’s native and included in Microsoft Teams.

Tasks By Planner And To-Do: This section of Teams is one of our favorites because it allows you to create “complex” to-do lists where you can assign each item to one or more people; have a progress status, priority and due date; add documents and files; and create a checklist of all the things that need to be done. Better yet, team members who are responsible for the project can provide status updates and check off items that are completed so you know where you are with any particular project.

Video Conferencing: While Teams is not as slick as Zoom, it does have some features that make it better for team collaboration and projects. The biggest advantage over Zoom is that you can hold a video conference, and the recording of the meeting – along with all of the notes, files and links – will remain in that Team for easy reference later on. This can be extremely helpful for people who might not have been able to attend a meeting, making it easy for them to find and watch the recording, and it also retains a record of critical conversations. Plus, it eliminates expensive Zoom licenses for all employees because it’s included in Microsoft 365.

File Sharing and Collaboration: Each team or channel in Teams has its own Files tab where team members can upload, store, and access files related to specific projects or discussions. This centralization reduces the need to email files back and forth and ensures that everyone has access to the latest version of a document. Users can share files and documents directly within Teams, making it simple to collaborate on projects without switching between different applications. Multiple team members can work on the same document simultaneously, whether it’s a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, or other Microsoft 365 file. Changes made by one user are instantly visible to others, fostering seamless teamwork.

If you want to see a demo of Teams or do a cost analysis to see how implementing this can save your organization/money on Slack, Zoom and other project management software by combining it into one application, click here to schedule a brief call.