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Malicious Bots – Semalt Provides Tips How To Rectify The Issue

Alexander Peresunko, the Semalt Customer Success Manager, states that digital transformation has drastically changed the way we run our businesses and as well our lifestyle. Thanks to the smartphone and laptop technology as well as global internet penetration more than 3 billion of people use the internet just to chat with their friends. Besides, online shopping and booking of flight tickets have become an integral part of modern life.

Automated internet programs

Automated internet programs that are also known as bots were created for various reasons. Some of them are good while the others are bad. The good ones include social media bots, search engine bots, aggregator bots and others. The malicious or bad bots have been created by hackers to steal your personal information and perform automated tasks on your computer devices.

Get rid of fake registrations

Some of their functions are creating fake registrations, collecting personal information, scraping the content, products, and prices, creating a mess for you when booking and selling tickets online, and so on. Such nefarious activities are endless and should be prevented by all means. For example, if you are running an online business, you are likely to damage your website if you continuously attacked by bad bots. The hackers and competitors can be stopped by blocking their IP addresses.

Analyzing Server Logs

Apache, NGINX, and ISS server logs can be manually analyzed to find out malicious activities and the bots of your web pages. Every time, the log is exported to a spreadsheet, you must create the columns to identify the IP address and user agent. When you have identified both of them, it would be easy for you to block them one by one. Alternatively, you can isolate those IPs and block them from your web browsers especially Firewall. It is a laborious process and may consume several hours, but the results are incredible and beyond your expectations.

Showing CAPTCHA

Show CAPTCHA to both bots and real humans to protect your website from the hackers. It is one of the most common and surprising practices to block bad bots and robots on all of your relevant pages. CAPTCHA should be shown to all of the people or bots who visit your website without your permission.

Robots.txt

It is one of the major mistakes various webmasters make is setting the robots.txt to Disallow URLs, believing that the crawlers and bots, good or bad, would not transverse through their websites. It would not be wrong to say that this method would take a lot of time, but the results are always great. You can get rid of the bots by changing the settings in your text files. In short, you should tweak the robots.txt file to stop scrapers from stealing your web content and articles.