The 8 Malicious Bots Targeting Your Business—And How They Operate

Understanding Malicious Bots and Their Impact

The internet is crawling with bots—there are good and bad bots. While good bots assist with search engine indexing and customer service automation, malicious bots exploit vulnerabilities, steal data, and drain marketing budgets.

How Did Malicious Bots Become a Threat?

Decades ago, cybercriminals primarily relied on manual hacking techniques. However, as technology advanced, automation allowed fraudsters to scale their attacks using bots. Today, bad bots account for a significant portion of internet traffic, targeting everything from ad campaigns to login security.

These bots often disguise themselves as legitimate traffic, making detection more difficult. Their ability to mimic human behavior, use rotating IPs, and bypass security measures means businesses need a proactive defense strategy to combat them effectively.

Here’s a breakdown of the most dangerous bots and how they operate.

1. DDoS Bots: Overwhelming Your Website with Traffic

Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks were once launched from a single device, flooding a target with excessive requests until it crashed. As the internet evolved, so did the attack methods. Modern Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks use botnets—massive networks of infected devices—to generate traffic spikes that overwhelm servers.

How They Work

Hackers deploy malware that infects thousands (or even millions) of devices, turning them into botnets. These infected machines—without the owners’ knowledge—are instructed to send overwhelming amounts of traffic to a target website. This can result in slow performance, website crashes, or even entire digital services being taken offline.

DDoS bots are often used for ransom attacks, where criminals demand payment to stop the flood of traffic, or as a smokescreen for more sophisticated cyber intrusions, such as data theft.

2. Web Scraping Bots: Stealing Data for Competitive Gain

Web scraping bots systematically scan and extract information from websites, often stealing pricing strategies, proprietary content, and customer reviews. While some web scraping is legitimate (e.g., search engines indexing pages), many scrapers operate without permission, hurting businesses.

How They Work

These bots navigate sites at lightning speed, pulling data that businesses have carefully curated. A competitor might deploy a web scraper to undercut pricing strategies, while bad actors could steal intellectual property, republishing stolen content as their own.

Continuous scraping also puts excessive strain on website servers, slowing down site performance and negatively affecting visitor experience.

3. Credential Stuffing Bots: Breaking Into Accounts

Cybercriminals collect stolen username and password pairs—often from past data breaches—and use bots to test them across different sites. If a visitor reuses their password on multiple platforms, these bots can crack open accounts and gain unauthorized access.

How They Work

A bot loads a list of stolen credentials and systematically attempts logins on multiple sites. This method is especially dangerous for banking, e-commerce, and SaaS platforms, where compromised accounts can lead to fraud, identity theft, and financial loss.

Hackers often run these bots at scale, trying thousands of logins per second. The goal isn’t just to steal one account—it’s to validate and exploit credentials across multiple platforms.

4. Spam Bots: Flooding Platforms with Junk

Spam bots are some of the most visible malicious bots, flooding websites, forums, and social media with unwanted advertisements, fake comments, and phishing scams.

How They Work

These bots create fake accounts or hijack existing ones to spread misleading links, post fake product reviews, or distribute misinformation. They can be deployed to manipulate public opinion, promote scams, or spread malware.

Spam bots erode trust in online communities, making it difficult for real visitors to engage without encountering fake interactions.

5. Credit Card Testing Bots: Exploiting Stolen Payment Data

When cybercriminals obtain stolen credit card information, they need to verify which cards are still active. Credit card testing bots automate this process, running small transactions on e-commerce sites until they find a working card.

How They Work

Fraudsters program bots to attempt microtransactions (e.g., $0.01 charges) on various platforms. Once they identify a valid card, they either make fraudulent purchases or sell the card details on the dark web.

These attacks create a headache for businesses, as credit card fraud leads to chargebacks, financial losses, and reputation damage.

6. Click Fraud Bots: Draining Ad Budgets with Fake Engagement

Click fraud bots manipulate digital advertising by generating fake clicks on paid ads, wasting marketing budgets without real visitor engagement.

How They Work

Fraudsters deploy these bots to click on pay-per-click (PPC) ads repeatedly, driving up costs for advertisers while delivering no real traffic. Some companies even use click fraud bots against competitors to sabotage their ad campaigns.

The inflated numbers skew marketing analytics, making it difficult for businesses to determine which advertising strategies are actually working.

7. Fake Account Creation Bots: Spamming Registrations

Fake account bots register thousands of fake accounts on platforms to engage in fraudulent activities, such as referral fraud, phishing scams, and misinformation campaigns.

How They Work

These bots fill out registration forms using automated scripts, creating fake profiles to game reward systems, manipulate engagement metrics, or conduct spam campaigns. This can distort business analytics and lead to reputation damage and security risks.

8. Inventory Hoarding Bots: Manipulating Product Availability

These bots are a nightmare for e-commerce sites, adding high-demand products to shopping carts without completing purchases. This blocks real visitors from accessing inventory, often allowing scalpers to resell limited products at higher prices.

How They Work

Bots continuously monitor product listings, instantly adding items to carts when they become available. While they don’t always complete the purchase, they artificially inflate demand, forcing businesses to raise prices or restock frequently.

Protecting Your Business from Malicious Bots

Understanding how bad bots operate is the first step toward protection. Businesses need an advanced detection system or pay per click fraud solution to block fraudulent traffic without affecting legitimate visitors.

Get started with Anura’s 15-day free trial to protect your business from malicious bots today.