Spam Bots

Spam bots are automated programs designed specifically to inundate online platforms with unsolicited content. Spam bots are amongst the most seriously annoying bots for consumers, as they constantly target user generated content to post  unwanted ads, links, and malicious content on forums, comment sections, and social media. As well as the annoyance, these can lead to further social engineering and phishing attacks, as well as malware and other monstrosities from all these dubious links. These spambots are hated by users, and any sites or content platforms riddled with these bots, has immediate brand integrity issues. Often the content owner is powerless to stop them - they don’t have the ability to control the platform access. This leads to a great deal of frustration, as many have found out on the Telegram service to their cost.

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What Sets Spambots Apart

Apart from the fact Spambots are uniquely persistent, annoying and disruptive, they are often tied to other fraudulent activities. From amazing stock picks, to crypto deals, they are often seeking potential victims for much more serious fraud. However, these are usually pretty dumb bots, with limited capacity for evasion from serious bot detection.

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Telegram bots 

Telegram has been particularly rife with spam bots, and the platform seems to be a rich hub for selling all sorts of malicious bots. The basic concept is to sell the idea of working from home for $1000 a day, and then sell the bot kits to provide the means of earning illegal funds. For example, Telegram channels directly solicit phishing kits - packages of bots and services to allow even a complete novice with no programming experience to launch sophisticated bots from phishing to credential stuffing. You can also buy Fullz and verified credential pairs.

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The Pervasive Threat: Identifying Spambot Activity

Common Indicators

Recognizing spambot activity is very easy, it’s actually hard to miss:

• Spam content in user forums, comments 
• Duplicate content
• Content type, crypto, stock picks, dubious investment, gambling, work from home, dubious offshore surgery, are all popular content themes.
• Spikes in traffic
• Spikes in user registrations to create the fake bot accounts

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How to Defend Against Spam Bots

CAPTCHA works on most of these bots. However, this also typically annoys users as they have to prove human identity for each login. 

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Behavioral Analysis

VerifiedVisitors uses and AI platform that offers advanced behavioral analysis tools to just weed out the actual bot traffic and serve CAPTCHA or block these irritants directly.