Tag Archive for: Bots

Beating The Bad Bots: Identify and Block Spam Traffic To Boost Your Google Ranking

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Advancements in technology have helped us propel forward, changing the way we work and live our daily lives. However, its rapid adoption has led to less sombre means. We have all seen and participated in those various bot tests that some websites carry out, where we have to select the picture tiles which have particular objects. The measure is taken by sites to reduce spam traffic.

(Source: Statista)

Spam traffic is used in some cases by cybercriminals to commit scams and fraud and has become a tool for a phishing scam and malware spread. It is problematic as it is inexpensive to create and send. In 2020, spam messages accounted for a colossal 58.71% of email traffic as the graph above indicates. 

It also has a negative impact on your Google ranking. No body like spam traffic, including Google. Once the search engine leader identifies increasing bot traffic on a particular website, it starts penalising and push ranking down.

What is Bad Bot?

There are a range of different bots that you find on the backend of the internet carrying out different types of tasks. Some are harmless such as search engine bots used by Google and Bing, which help the service specifically by browsing the internet to help make available content that can be useful to users based on search queries.

However, bad bots are used in an entirely different way to serve a different purpose. These include. Searching sites and scraping data of it to benefit other sites or sell on and steal information and repost it under a different identity.

Bad Bots also can disturb site metrics as they inflate search results and increase website traffic unnecessarily, leading to slower loading times and unnecessary investments in hardware to maintain the website infrastructure. As we can see from the graph below, in 2019, 24% of traffic emanated from the movement of bad bots.

(Source: Imperva)

They are also able to perform malicious acts on-site, which lead to damaging networks through things such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks flood sites with data higher than a level that it can handle. 

Bad Bots are mostly organised on botnets which are a collection of internet-connected devices that have been…

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It’s not just you: It was nearly impossible to buy the PlayStation 5 at launch thanks in part to resellers using the same type of bots that snatch up Yeezy drops

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  • The PlayStation 5 launched on Thursday, but it wasn’t sold in stores.
  • The only way to get a PlayStation 5 at launch was through a preorder, but some retailers sold PS5 consoles digitally on a first-come, first-served basis. Both Walmart and Target were walloped by customer demand.
  • The first drop of PlayStation 5 consoles on Walmart’s website came at 12 p.m. ET on Thursday, and it promptly took down the entire Walmart web store. Subsequent drops, three hours apart, presented a similarly difficult situation for many customers.
  • Resellers boasting dozens of PS5 consoles have popped up on eBay, StockX, and Instagram, and they appear to have used the same type of retail-busting software that sneaker resellers use to get the latest Yeezys.

After months of anticipation, Sony‘s PlayStation 5 finally launched on Thursday — but it seemed nearly impossible to buy the console through any online retailer.

Because of the pandemic, Sony decided not to go the traditional console-launch route and didn’t sell the new game console in retail stores at launch. Instead of massive launch lines and stories of excited fans camping out overnight in front of GameStop, the main way to get a PS5 on November 12 was to have preordered the console months ago through one of several retailers.

Beyond that, PlayStation 5 buyers had one recourse on launch day: the digital storefronts of major retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. And at 12 p.m. ET on November 12, people got a look at how well that system worked.
The flood of customers was so voluminous that it caused the entire Walmart web store to crash, and users were greeted with a message explaining that the store was overloaded by too many shoppers at one time.

“Last week, when we released the item for sale on Walmart.com, we did see massive traffic, which caused some customers to experience intermittent slowness for a few minutes,” a Walmart representative told Business Insider. “We quickly caught up with the volume and are currently restocking the item for additional release of inventory throughout the holidays.”

So how is it that one of America’s largest retailers was unable to handle a flood of digital customers?

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Some of those…

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Pakistan bots wage cyber warfare – India Today

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Pakistan bots wage cyber warfare  India Today

Security agencies swing into action as thousands of fake accounts from Pak flood social media with anti-India posts after the repeal of 370.

“cyber warfare news” – read more

Internet Blackout Coming To Show The EU Parliament It’s Not Just ‘Bots’ Concerned About Article 13

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Last week Glyn mentioned that the German Wikipedia had announced plans to “go dark” this Thursday to protest Articles 11 and 13 of the EU Copyright Directive. And now it appears that a whole bunch of other websites will join in the protest (including us). While we won’t go completely dark, we’ll be putting up a banner in support of the many websites that do plan to go dark — and we’ve heard that an awful lot of websites will be joining in. Supporters keep trying to dismiss these complaints as just being “bots” or the big internet companies, but lots of others will be showing that this is about the broader internet this Thursday. This is just one of many protests happening this week, with in-person protests happening all through the EU this coming weekend as well. Meanwhile there are lots of efforts to get MEPs to pledge to vote against Article 13 that has been gaining momentum as well. I have no idea if these kinds of protests will be as effective as the blackday back during the SOPA fight, but I can say that Article 13 will be way worse for the internet than SOPA ever would have been.

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