Then there's online shopping, banking, remote working, video conferencing and more, all passing through the internet, connecting us wherever we are.
Even as internet usage grows, it makes up just a fraction of total online traffic.
One recent report suggests that these human-led activities account for just 27% of internet use.
Security researchers estimate that nearly three quarters of online traffic is caused by cybercriminals and scammers.
They have been using smart systems to automate many of the common tasks involved in hacking and online theft.
The hacker acquires a list of stolen usernames and passwords.
They choose a target website, like Amazon, and begin testing the stolen credentials to see if they can access an account.
Take control of the account and use to place fraudulent orders or steal personal information.
For a target list that contains hundreds or thousands of credentials, testing them all could take weeks.
Using bots, the hacker can do the credential checking process automatically, which is much quicker than having to do it themselves.
Bots can even attack several websites simultaneously, allowing the hacker to increase their chances of success.
With bots they have found a way to maximize their reach quickly and cheaply.
If there is a way to make money online, criminals have probably already found a way to automate it with bots.
Bots can be used to take web services offline with a distributed denial of service attack for instance.
Other bots may 'scrape' personal information from public websites and feed it into a machine learning algorithm to improve future hacking attempts.
Good technology used for bad. Bots are an incredibly useful technology.
Think of the chatbots used by many websites to help you locate the product or service you need, using AI-driven questions and responses to give you information.
Bots have become a very valuable tool for criminals - and the amount of malicious bot activity grows every year.
Expect to see another significant rise in attacks next year.
In the meantime, make sure your personal information is secured against bot attacks with Panda Dome Passwords and Panda Dome Premium.
This Cyber News was published on www.pandasecurity.com. Publication date: Mon, 08 Jan 2024 15:43:04 +0000