Bot

What is a Bot?

A bot is any software application that runs automated tasks over the internet. Bots account for a significant portion of all web traffic. Some are beneficial: search engine crawlers index the web, monitoring bots check uptime, and chatbots assist customers. Others are malicious, designed to exploit applications, steal data, or disrupt services at a scale no human operator could achieve manually.

Types of Malicious Bots

• Scraper bots extract content, pricing data, or proprietary information through web scraping.
• Credential bots automate credential stuffing and account takeover attacks.
• Scalping bots buy limited-availability items (event tickets, sneakers) faster than human users.
• Spam bots flood forms, comment sections, and messaging systems with unwanted content.
• DDoS bots participate in coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks.

How Bots Evade Detection

Sophisticated bots mimic human behavior by randomizing mouse movements, solving CAPTCHAs through solving services, rotating IPs using backconnect proxies and residential proxies, and emulating real browser fingerprints. They may also throttle request rates to stay below rate limiting thresholds.

Bot Detection with AntiProxies

AntiProxies helps platforms identify bot traffic by flagging connections from known proxy networks, VPNs, Tor exits, and datacenter IPs. By combining IP reputation data with connection-type classification, AntiProxies provides the threat intelligence layer that feeds into your broader bot management strategy, helping you allow good bots while blocking bad ones. Learn about the hidden cost of bot traffic to your business, or explore our e-commerce and SaaS use cases to see how platforms use this data in practice. For detection database coverage, see our bot detection page.