Bots have become integral to our lives, offering many benefits across various industries. Of all these bots, there are good bots, bots for telling dad jokes and (significantly less cool) bots focused on distributing malware. Understanding the types of bots out there should help you harness the power of good bots while helping you identify bots to avoid. This article will explore all types of bots, empowering you to make informed decisions and reap the rewards while keeping risks at bay.

The rollercoaster ride of Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout has taken another twist, as the social media platform looks poised to be rebranded “X”. Should we be worried about the security and privacy implications of Musk’s “everything” app?

Taylor Swift’s Eras tour has literally been the hottest ticket in music over the past few months, with millions of fans scrambling for their spot in arenas and stadiums around the world. But many “Swifties” have been left heartbroken as the demand far outstrips the number of tickets available. To make the pill even more bitter to swallow, there are plenty of tickets available to buy for the sold-out shows – but at many times their face value, on secondary markets.

Netacea is proud to announce that six months on from completing SOC 2 Type 1 compliance, we can now confirm SOC 2 Type 2 compliance as well, further demonstrating our commitment to data security and protecting our customers.

In a constantly connected world, protecting sensitive data in what are often complex database structures requires staying up to date with cyber criminals’ malicious attack techniques, and infection methods. This research is an extension of another project which involves monitoring attacks carried out on database servers worldwide. Understanding how these bots work can keep your digital world safe and secure.

If you’re shopping around for a way to stop bots damaging your brand – be that through enabling automated fraud, hoarding your stock, scraping your content or prices, or just eating up server resources – you’ve probably seen vendors advocating the use of “client-side detection”. They’re probably telling you it’s necessary for accurate bot detection.

As reported widely in the press, the Genesis Market is no more. On Tuesday 4th April 2023, the FBI seized control of the infamous marketplace that’d had hundreds of thousands of stolen digital identities for sale, replacing its login page with a takedown notice and call for further information from its users.

As part of our recently released 2022 Threat Roundup report, Forescout Vedere Labs described how the Mirai IoT botnet continues to evolve via new variants and adaptations, such as Gafgyt and RapperBot, more than six years after it started taking over IoT devices and had its source code leaked.

In January 2023, PrivateLoader, a malware loader from a pay-per-install malware distribution service called “ruzki”, started to distribute Tofsee (a.k.a. Gheg), a modular spambot. Spambots are typically utilized by cybercriminals to spread malware and phishing emails, and this particular one has been in operation since at least 2008.

Emotet is undoubtedly a very resilient botnet. Even though its operation was disrupted by Europol in January 2021, Emotet came back a few months later and continues to spread. In May 2022, shortly after Microsoft released new controls related to malicious macros, Netskope Threat Labs analyzed an Emotet campaign where they were testing a new delivery method, by using LNK files.