Who's A Bad Bot?

One company’s crackdown on bot fraud and mitigation.

- Joy Ling

Imagine someone living hidden within the walls of your house, observing your every move, studying your every interaction and shadowing your behaviour until the day he can flawlessly mimic you. Only, it isn’t human. While sounding like the premise of Parasite and Annihilation combined, the setup isn’t spun off the imagination of a sci-fi author. It is happening as you read this.

Sure, you’ve heard of cybercrime, but how much do you really know about the extent of it? Like us, bots evolve. What were once limited to data centres operating by rudimentary rules and running predictably are now occupying user devices and residential IPs, doing pretty much what we’ve just described in the opening line.

There are good bots, of course, responsible for a huge portion of what makes the Internet so great by crawling, analysing and cataloguing data in search engines and antivirus companies. But like every decent story, there’s yin to the yang. Bad bots hack accounts, duplicate login credentials, and steal from e-commerce transactions.