Furthermore , more bot activity is performed by malicious bots than by regular ones ”.
Simply put , a bot is just a computer program that makes decisions for a user or another program or simulates a human . Bots can be good or bad . Programmers determine their role and purpose on the Internet .
The most ubiquitous bots are the programs that access websites and scrape content for search engine indexes known as spiders or crawlers . A chatbot is a program that can simulate talk with a human being , often employing advanced machine learning and natural language processing for sophisticated conversation or using predetermined scripts , as seen in many customer-service chatbots .
Bots are used to scour concert tickets , find the best prices on products or replace certain words in headlines . They can also be used for benign automated activity , such as posting to social media to promote a company or product or flooding feeds to amplify a message , often political .
And bots can also be dangerous . Hackers can infect devices with malicious code and turn a victim ’ s phone or computer into a bot that then becomes part of a network of infected devices , a botnet controlled by a single attacker or attack group .
Types of bots Bots are used for many tasks . Kaspersky lists the following types :
• Chatbots : Simulate human conversation . Often used for customer service .
• Social bots : Operate on social media platforms ( such as Twitter and Facebook ) and automatically generate messages , advocate ideas and act as followers of users and as fake accounts to
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