What is email spambot – How to get rid of them? – Guide 2023
In this brief guide we are presenting easiest way to understand what is spambot, their types and how to prevent them.
Spam bots are autonomous program or software that send large number of emails or it could be comment on your site.
What is a Bot?
A bot is a software application that is designed particularly for actions in which human’s repetitive actions required at a much higher speed.
One good thing about these bots is that they are automated. Eventually, they can run according to the way they are programmed and doesn’t particularly require human interaction.
Bots (Based on usage and behaviour):
- Good bots:
Bot which is helping users for assisting purpose or helps organizations to achieve their goals are identified as a good bot. Few good examples are Search engine bot, chatbots and social bots.
- Bad bots:
Bot which is harming others systems by doing malicious activities over the internet are known as a Bad Bot.
These bots are developed by cyber criminals and hackers for personal and financial gains. Scraper bots and Spambots are some of the well-known examples of Bad Bots.
In this Guide, we will be discussing particularly about SPAM Bots and how to catch them at the initial stages to minimize the damage or loss.
Types of Spambot
Based on the kind of activity, Spambots can be of many types. Some of them are scrap data bots, comment section spam bot and Email Spam Bots.
1. Email Spam Bots:
These bots collect your email addresses by crawling web pages by matching pattern, like botname@domain.name. Once the data is scrapped by those bad scrappers. Then the list of illegal email database is ready.
The Hackers or Attackers send out large number of emails to the list of those users whose emails were scrapped without their consent. These emails are mostly in malicious and may consists of malware or have some link which leads to collect your personal information (phishing).
Email Spam is not done by only harvested database means but the email list can also be purchased from the dark web, which is definitely illegal.
2. Comment Spam Bot
Comment spam bot can generally be seen on open forums where comments are enabled. These bots usually initiate false comments to sell a product or create a backlink to increase website traffic.
Many websites allow public commenting for discussion purpose, which makes it easier for comment spam bots to comments without even creating an account on that particular website.
And if your platform requires an authentication for comments, then these bots can create fake accounts and start false comments.
3. Social Media bots
The most social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are more prone to these bots. These bots typically post messages with offers, helps in trends and might spread hate speech or used for abusive purpose.
These bots can like, share and even comments on the posts, which is definitely not relevant to the posts. The accounts could be a fake account or may be a real user whose account has been hacked.
Sometimes the account will look legitimate like real account. But they can be identified pretty easily if you dig the matter a little bit.
These bots are used for tweets and retweeting. Beside this they can also like the post which satisfies their set of rules like specific people, helps in making trends.
You can search internet and there will be a lot freely available (Warning may contain virus, malwares or mining scripts).
Prevent spambot:
These spambots usually be found on signup forms and forums with subscriptions. They exploit these fields by submitting hundreds even thousands of mail addresses and these mails can belong to anyone.
A. Techniques to Avoid Spambots:
1. ReCAPTCHA
The best and and easiest way to avoid spam is to use ReCAPTCHA and it helps prevent abuse on the website sensitive forms like contact. It is the simplest way of handling abusing traffic and you know what, Its free of cost.
According to google “reCAPTCHA” uses cutting-edge technology to analyze and prevents those nasty spambots. reCAPTCHA is adaptive and keep automated spambots at distance and prevent from engaging on your site.
And you know what, after adding reCAPTCHA to your website, these bots cannot pass this validation, unless it’s a real person! Isn’t it great?
2. Confirmed or Double Opt-In
COI is a technique in which you send an email for validation whether the email belongs to real person or not. This email consists of a URL in which you open a link to activate your account.
Likewise, if you are opting for newsletter emails, then an email will be sent to you in which you need to click the link to receive newsletters mails.
This technique will help you avoid spambot as well as gain good quality leads. Besides, it also reduces the chance hard bounce mail because this COI will make sure that the user has entered a valid email address along with their name.
B. Detecting spam bots
Spambots are programmed in such a way that they act like real user. These bots are not easily detected. There are few things that might help you in distinguish between the real user and the bot.
Bots are mostly related to English language. They do lots of grammatical mistakes which makes it hard for you understand. You may have observed this in comments section or in spam mail.
These messages mostly contain links. And these links lead you to a URL where it does not load anything page or keeps on loading.
These types of links can also help hacker or spammers to collect your personal data or to spread malware by showing you something like FREE GIFT 500$ or similar.
So, to avoid these, see below for how we can prevent these spams.
C. Techniques to avoid Spam Bots:
1. Time-analysis of forms:
Forms these days, are prime target for spambots. Therefore, there are only a couple fields that needs to be filled during the signup process.
Filling them requires some time when a real human fill them. On the other hand, bots do not require anytime. The difference can be easily calculated.
Here is a trick which will help you prevent spam bots without the need of reCAPTCHA:
Code Trick:
In your contact form put this input hidden field:
Html Code:
<input type="hidden" name="hash" value="<?php echo md5($secret_key.time()).','.time(); ?>" />And in your php code where you sending email perform this check.
PHP Code:
{
$human_typing_time = 5;/* page load (1s) + submit (1s) + typing time (3s) /
$vars = explode(',', $_POST['hash']);
if(md5($secret_key.$vars[1]) != $vars[0] || time() < $var[1] + $human_typing_time) {
//bot?
exit();
}
}
2. Blocking Comment Spam:
The very first technique is blocking comments are not useful for you. You can use tools to filter the comment spam, and it can be implemented using the tool’s API services.
You can simply implement least time for form filling. If the form is submitted below average time, then it could be bot sign-up.
3. Geolocation based Blocking form:
Geolocation blocking also prevent bots from a particular part of the globe. So, blocking geolocation bots will also block real users for that location.
Hence, you should only use this technique when you know that this particular location is generating more problems than benefits.
4. Blacklisting IPs:
This one is most simple and easy to do method. To block spam bots, you need to blacklist those IP’s or series of IPs on the firewall (Example: PHP MyAdmin).
Since, spamming can be prevented this way. Before blocking, you can also limit IP addresses for particular number of form submissions from specific IP addresses and block once it exceeds the allowed number.
5. Web Application Firewalls:
Firewalls definitely can help you spam attacks including SQL injection attacks. Just for your knowledge, In SQL injection, the spammer injects code with a SQL query or number of queries in forms to get access or desire results.
But Firewalls helps your website to avoid authentication issues and prevent gaining access to the database.
Conclusion
Spambots are like everywhere in our online world. However, In this guide we tried to cover most important aspects which you can take as measures and avoid spambots them. Those spambots won’t affect your websites or systems.
We are hoping that this guide would be useful for you. Spread the word so can more people get benefit.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s):
Q#1: How to detect spam bots?
A: Use tools and techniques which are also present in this guide.
Q#2: Types of Spambots?
A: Some of them are:
- Email Spam
- Comment Spam
- Social Media bots
Q#3: How to prevent/get rid of Spambot’s abuse?
A: The best and easy way is to use following:
1) reCAPTCHA
2) Confirmed or Double Opt-In
3) Time analysis fields
Q#4: What are Spambots?
A: Spambots are also known as bad bots. Even though in this modern world, we are interacting more with a bot than a human, Examples would be: robocall or chatbots.
Unless these bots are not causing harm, they are good bots.
Q#5: Do you know many similar bots are working on the web and what information they get from you?
A: Basically, 40% of the global internet traffic is bots consisting of both good and bad ones. The most affected industry is Banking and related finances, here 42% of the traffic is of bad bots.
Bad bots are used to gain profit by scraping. They also collect sensitive data through fake pages and other techniques.
One of the most affected industries is ticketing, where 39% of which the web traffic is bad bots. Bad bots buy tickets in real-time (As you know human need time but bot don’t to perform any action), Because then they sale those tickets to 3rd parties. which directly affects prices and the customers.
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