gain followers . It is these bots that caused Musk to initially cancel his offer to buy Twitter ( for $ 41.39 billion ) because he claimed the company did not disclose the extent of how many bots operate on the platform . According to a Statistica report , around 5 % of “ users ” on Twitter are bots .
• Shop bots : Shop online to find the best price for products a user is looking for .
• Spider bots or web crawlers : Scan content on web pages to help search engines understand how best to answer users ’ search queries .
• Knowbots : Collect user knowledge by automatically visiting websites to retrieve information that fulfils certain criteria .
• Monitoring bots : Monitor the health of a website or system .
• Transactional bots : Complete bank transactions on behalf of humans .
• Download bots : Automatically download software or mobile apps .
• Ticketing bots : Purchase tickets to popular events . ‘ Bad ’ bots
“ Bad ” bots are programmed to attack / hack user accounts and perform harmful acts . Kaspersky ’ s list of “ bad ”/ malicious bots includes :
• Spambots : Harvest e-mail addresses from contact or guestbook pages .
• Malicious chatterbots : Obtain personal information from unsuspecting victims , including credit card numbers .
• File-sharing bots : Take users ’ queries ( such as a popular movie or artist ’ s album ) and respond to the question stating that they have the file available for download , providing a link . The user clicks on the link , downloads and opens it , and unknowingly infects their computer .
• Credential stuffing : This refers to bots “ stuffing ” known usernames and passwords ( usually sourced from data breaches ) into online log-in pages to gain unauthorized access to user accounts .
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