Malicious
use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on
networked computers, such as a denial-of-service
attack by a botnet.
Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage
around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spam-bot is an internet bot that
attempts to spam large amounts of content on the
Internet, usually adding advertising links.
v
There
are malicious bots (and botnets) of the following types:
1.
Spam-bots that harvest
email addresses from
internet
forums, contact
forms or guestbook pages
2.
Downloader
programs that suck bandwidth by downloading entire web sites
3.
Web site scrapers that grab the content of web sites
and re-use it without permission on automatically generated doorway pages
4.
Viruses
and worms
5.
DDoS attacks
6.
Botnets / zombie computers; etc.
7.
File-name
modifiers on peer-to-peer file-sharing
networks. These
change the names of files (often containing malware) to match user search
queries.
8.
Automating
the entry of internet sweepstakes or instant win games to get an advantage
9.
Automating
tasks on promotional web sites to win prizes
10. Votebots which automatically cast votes for
or against certain forms of user-contributed content such as videos on YouTube or reader comments on blog pages.
*Information
provided from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia