The UK is one of the world's worst performers when it comes to protecting against bots – though most countries are pretty poor.

That's according to DataDome, which states that only 1.8% of large UK domains are fully protected against bots, compared with a Europe-wide average of 2.5% and a global average of 2.8%. Bigger organizations are no better than smaller ones, with only 2% of domains with more than 30 million monthly visits fully protected.

And it's an increasing issue. AI-driven bot traffic is becoming the norm, said DataDome, with AI bot and crawler traffic having risen from 2.6% of verified bot traffic in January this year to more than 10.1% by August. The company said it detected nearly 1.7 billion requests from OpenAI crawlers alone in a single month – scraping web content, draining server resources, and exposing proprietary data.

Earlier this year, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned of a developing digital divide between systems keeping pace with AI-enabled threats and those that are more vulnerable.

"Our data on low bot protection rates provides concrete evidence that this is already happening, proving that many UK businesses are ill-equipped for the next wave of AI-driven cyberattacks," said Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome.

"This gap is not accidental, but is rooted in systemic national issues: an economy dominated by resource-strapped small and medium-sized enterprises, a persistent and critical cybersecurity skills gap, and a business culture that frequently underinvests in security."

Businesses aren't doing a great job of countering the problem, the researchers said. Legacy defenses are failing fast, with only 2.8% of websites fully protected in 2025, down from 8.4% in 2024.

While nearly nine-in-ten domains disallow GPTBot in their robots.txt files, AI-powered crawlers and browsers ignore these directives, rendering static blocking strategies obsolete. Meanwhile, anti-fingerprinting bots were only blocked by around 7% of websites, and fake Chrome and curl bots were detected just 21% of the time.

The weakest protection was seen in the government, non-profit, and telecoms sectors, while travel and hospitality, gambling, and real estate were the best-performing.

Threat actors, said DataDome, are increasingly blending basic automation with more advanced tactics such as leveraging agentic AI tools that simulate human behavior, bypass Captchas, manipulate TLS fingerprints, and adapt in real time.

"AI agents are rewriting the rules of online engagement," said Segura. "Traditional defenses, built to spot static automation, are collapsing under this complexity. Businesses can't tell if the AI traffic they're seeing is good or bad, which leaves them both exposed to fraud and blind to opportunity. What's needed is adaptive, intent-based protection that can make sense of this AI-driven chaos in real time."

Earlier this year, research from Imperva revealed that bot traffic now accounts for more than half of all web traffic, with malicious bots now making up 37% of all internet traffic.

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Security firm Barracuda has called for organizations to factor AI bots that scrape data from public websites into their security strategies, labelling them not as good or bad bots, but “gray bots”.

Defining these three categories of bot, senior principal software engineer for application security engineering at Barracuda Rahul Gupta said: “There are good bots – such as search engine crawler bots, SEO bots, and customer service bots – and bad bots, designed for malicious or harmful online activities like breaching accounts to steal personal data or commit fraud.

“In the space between them you will find what Barracuda calls ‘gray bots.’ … Gray bots are blurring the boundaries of legitimate activity. They are not overtly malicious, but their approach can be questionable. Some are highly aggressive.”

Examples of gray bots given by Gupta include web scraper bots, automated content aggregators for news, travel offers, and so on, and generative AI scraper bots.

The activity of this third category was specifically highlighted by Gupta, with web applications receiving millions of requests from bots such as Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and TikTok’s Bytespider bot.

“ClaudeBot is the most active Gen AI gray bot in our dataset by a considerable margin,” said Gupta. “ClaudeBot’s relentless requests are likely to impact many of its targeted web applications.

According to Barracuda's analysis, one web application received an average of 323,300 AI scraper bot requests a day over the course of 30 days.

Another received 500,000 requests in a single day. A third received approximately 40,800 requests over the course of a day, with an average request rate of 17,000 per hour.

Gupta said this level of consistency was “unexpected”.

“It is generally assumed, and often the case, that gray bot traffic comes in waves, hitting a website for a few minutes to an hour or so before falling back,” he said, although he added that “constant bombardment or unexpected, ad hoc traffic surges [both] present challenges for web applications”.

This level of activity can disrupt operations and degrade the performance of web application traffic, Gupta said, as well as gathering up “vast volumes of proprietary or commercial data”.

There can also be more indirect impacts, such as distorting web traffic figures making it harder to take data driven decisions, Barracuda claimed.

Defensive measures

There are multiple reasons why organizations may wish to protect themselves from AI webscrapers, ranging from protecting their IP and copyright to data privacy concerns, as well as performance degradation.

Those in the creative industries in particular are increasingly worried about their data being used to train generative AI models without their permission, but it’s a dilemma that affects other businesses too.

In January 2024, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it would examine web scraping by generative AI bots as part of its investigation into the collection and processing of personal data by LLMs owned by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

"The impact of generative AI can be transformative for society if it's developed and deployed responsibly," said the ICO's executive director for regulatory risk, Stephen Almond, at the time.

"This call for views will help the ICO provide industry with certainty regarding its obligations and safeguard people's information rights and freedoms," he added.

For his part, Gupta recommended: “To ensure your web applications are protected against the impact of gray bots, consider implementing bot protection capable of detecting and blocking generative AI scraper bot activity.”

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We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. From credential stuffing, to stealing inventory, to price and content scraping, stopping bots is critical to a strong web experience for customers that is not undermined by bots.

Part of stopping bots has often involved some self-inflicted pain: serving our own web visitors CAPTCHAs to confirm they are not bots. This ruins web experiences, frustrates people, and harms business.

Watch this recorded webinar as it discusses today’s bot issues and new innovation from Cloudflare that stops bots like never before—while offering a future free of CAPTCHAs.

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Almost 40% of all traffic on the internet is “bad bot” activity, according to the latest industry data.

Automated bots, including those from search engines and social media networks, make up 64% of all internet traffic, the Barracuda Networks report found.

“The Bot attacks: Top Threats and Trends” report found that only a quarter of this was “good bot” activity. Nearly two-fifths (39%) were from “bad bots.” The report said these bad bots included basic web scrapers, attack scripts, and advanced persistent bots.

“These advanced bots try their best to evade standard defenses and attempt to perform their malicious activities under the radar. In our dataset, the most common of these persistent bots were ones that went after e-commerce applications and login portals,” the report said.

North America had the dubious distinction of accounting for the largest portion of bad bot traffic, and most of it originates from data centers, according to the report. North America accounted for 67% of bad bot traffic, followed by Europe and then Asia. The report said European bot traffic is more likely to come in from hosting services (VPS) or residential IPs than the North American traffic.

While the bots were automated, bad bots were designed to function during working hours, the report found.

“The attackers running these bad bots prefer to hide within the normal human traffic stream to avoid raising alarm bells. The common stereotype of a ‘hacker’ performing their attacks late into the night in a dark room with green fonts on a black screen has been replaced by people who set up their bots to carry out the automated attacks while they go about their day,” the report said.

Barracuda Networks gave some examples of bad bot activity, including pretending to be a known vulnerability scanner. This bot attempted to perform reconnaissance and probe for vulnerabilities using some basic attacks. As such, the bot was using a standard browser user agent but had additional custom HTTP headers that spoofed the headers of a scanner the victim organization used.

"While some bots like search engine crawlers are good, our research shows that over 60% of bots are dedicated to carrying out malicious activities at scale," said Nitzan Miron, VP of Product Management, Application Security, Barracuda.

"When left unchecked, these bad bots can steal data, affect site performance, and even lead to a breach. That's why it's critically important to detect and effectively block bot traffic."

Ocado has had to cancel thousands of orders after robots collided at one of its fulfilment centres and caused a fire.

Three bots that help pick groceries crashed into each other at the firm's Erith site on Friday, forcing around 800 workers to be evacuated and causing mass disruption for customers.

The London Fire Brigade were called to the scene and worked throughout the night to tackle the blaze, which had damaged "less than 1%" of the grid on which the three machines crashed.

"The correct protocols were successfully implemented including the evacuation of the building, the activation of the sprinkler system and the presence of the London Fire Brigade," the company said in a statement. "No one has been injured and all colleagues on site are safe. The damage is limited to a small section of less than 1% of the grid having been contained by planned fire attenuation measures.

"Aside from some residual smoke smell, the vast majority of the CFC is in good condition. While we expect some disruption to operations, we are working to restore normal service as soon as possible. We expect the facility to begin operating within the coming week and thank customers whose orders are affected for their patience."

Ocado fulfilment centres are highly automated and the Erith site specifically operates hundreds of robots - many of which run at speed around its grid, collecting and delivering groceries to factory staff.

This is not the first time one of its fulfilment centres has caught fire; in 2019, a distribution centre in Andover had a robot catch fire due to a fault in its battery charging unit. That site was completely destroyed after a four-day fire.

Accidents in mass automated factories do seem to be quite common and in some very rare cases, even fatal. In 2015, a man was grabbed and crushed to death by automated machinery that he was attempting to set up in a Volkswagen factory in Germany.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined three ticket brokers for using automated software to scalp thousands of tickets from Ticketmaster. It’s the first such settlement bought under anti-bot legislation in the US.

In the settlements, the FTC claimed that Cartisim Corp, Just in Time Tickets, and Concert Specials used bot software to automatically scrape and reserve tickets on event websites. Between them, these companies purchased over 150,000 tickets for various events and resold them, taking in millions of dollars in revenues.

Since January 2017, the organizations have used IP proxies to access Ticketmaster and fake accounts and credit cards to buy more tickets than they were allowed, say the settlements. They also used CAPTCHA-bypass services and fictitious names and addresses.

According to the FTC settlement documents, the company that made the most money from ticket bots was Concert Specials, run by Steven Ebrani. It made over $13.7 million in revenues selling over 82,000 tickets it scalped via approximately 35,500 Ticketmaster transactions.

Cartism, operated by Simon Ebrani, purchased almost 25,000 tickets in just over 9,000 separate transactions and earned over $3.8m in revenues scalping them. Just In Time Tickets, operated by Evan Kohanian, made over $8.6 million by automatically buying and scalping over 48,000 tickets through over 14,000 Ticketmaster transactions.

These three companies used ticket bot programs called Tixman, Tixdrop, and Automatick (also known as Smartick) to automatically search for and reserved tickets fitting their search criteria, blocking others from purchasing them.

All three defendants had previously signed agreements with the New York Attorney General agreeing not to use ticket bot software.

The FTC levied $31.6 million in fines against the three companies. Concert Specials got the highest fine of $16 million, and Just In Time Tickets received the next largest fine at $11 million Cartism Corp got dinged with a $4.4 million fine. Because of their inability to pay, though, all three companies received partial suspensions and will pay over $3.7 million in civil penalties, the FTC said.

Commissioners voted unanimously for the settlement, which is the first bought under the 2016 Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act. This legislation forbids organizations from circumventing protections that ticket vendors put in place to limit purchases.

Acting FTC chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said the penalties served as a warning to ticket scalpers as the world prepares for live events to resume after the pandemic.

According to Slaughter: "The settlements our staff negotiated with these alleged BOTS Act violators make clear that serious consequences will befall those who cheat fans out of a fair shot to secure tickets to live events. The civil penalty amounts in these settlements are much higher than the revenues that the defendants raked in through the conduct charged in the complaints."

A strange thing happened to me on the way to the supermarket this week. While driving along (or, rather, being driven) I received a call on my mobile from an 0330 number - the giveaway of a business trying to contact me.

Upon answering, I was informed by the woman on the other end that she was calling from an unnamed large electronics and white goods retailer and that she just wanted to check that the day I’d arranged to have my washing machine replaced was still convenient. When I said that it was, she very helpfully told me the four-hour window when I could expect the delivery people to arrive. A brief, polite and professional courtesy call, which went a long way in the saga of my washing machine woes (see Twitter for ranty details).

But there was something off about the conversation. The way she spoke and the pauses between when I stopped speaking and her responses were slightly too long and slightly too quiet for her to be a normal call centre worker. In fact, it was more reminiscent of the myriad “Hi, it’s Laura calling from your insurer. I’m calling about the accident you had in the last three months, is that correct?” intrusions I receive.

This is why I believe my interlocutor on Monday was, in fact, a bot. And a good one at that.

I don’t know whether it’s being a tech journalist that’s made me this way or whether I’m just getting old and crotchety, but I’m not a fan of the proliferation of chatbots and AI for customer service. I believe in the importance of human interaction and I don’t think I’m the only one - people on the whole like to interact with other people. The idea that I’ll have to descend through several layers of chirpy but slightly clinical robots to get to a real person (if, indeed, it’s possible to reach one at all) fills me with dread.

It’s not just the inhumanity of transactions either - bots can be uniquely unhelpful because they’re trying to anticipate what you want from a limited range of predefined categories. If your request falls outside that, then you - and it - will have a problem. Furthermore, if you’ve ever been on the phone to someone in a call centre who, while in possession of a human brain chooses not to use it and dead ends you with a “computer says no” script, then conversing with a robot will be even more frustrating, as you can’t even attempt to reason with it or get it to think abstractly or laterally.

Those are my prejudices, but on the phone this week on my probably-a-bot customer service rep, the question of whether she was flesh and blood or ones and zeros didn’t really occur to me until I hung up. My initial feeling was simply one of relief and, honestly, happiness that I had an interaction that was a bit more personal than the bland SMS messages I’d been getting up until then from the manufacturer.

I don’t think I’m quite a changed woman when it comes to my bot scepticism. But perhaps our artificially intelligent peers won’t be quite the cold, unapproachable, and mildly infuriating hurdle I’ve thus far expected them to be.

We all know that bots can cause sites to slow or crash, enable fraud, and steal data. But they can also distort the business intelligence you rely on to make strategic decisions. Not all bots however, are bad. The trick is knowing how to enable the good bots and block the bad ones.

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Managing your relationship with bots—good and bad—has become an inherent part of doing business in a connected world. With more than half of online traffic initiated by autonomous programs, it’s clear that bots are a driving force of technological change, and they’re here to stay.

This whitepaper explores the impact of autonomous programs, and lays out a comprehensive, flexible strategy that protects applications and data by filtering out malicious bots, whilst preparing organisations for sustained growth by being mindful of the opportunities these autonomous programs represent.

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Safeguarding the identity of users and managing the level of access they have to critical business applications could be the biggest security challenge organisations face in today’s assumed-breach world.

This whitepaper pulls credential theft under the microscope, examining why such attacks lead to large-scale data breaches, and identifying the secure access and bot protection needs necessary to combat them.

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The avalanche of digital innovation has spread money everywhere, making every business a potential for fraud. Fraudsters employ automated, faceless bots that scour business apps looking for any opportunity for profit. And since they target process weaknesses, as well as software vulnerabilities, you may not even know when it’s happening.

This whitepaper offers context which puts the threat of online fraud into perspective, and explores the defences capable of strengthening the security of applications pivotal to day-to-day modern industry.

Download it now to discover how to build your bot-defences.

Bots (programs built to do automated tasks) are now the most active presence on the internet, with their traffic surpassing that of humans according to an annual trends report delivered at the Code Conference in 2017.

Whilst these bots drive the technological change which improves customer experience - be it through internet shopping or digital assistants - they also have access to internet users' identity information. Consequently, it is often this same technology which enables fraud. The numbers are frightening, with $6.5 billion dollars lost to fraud in digital advertising 2017, according to the Bot Baseline Report.

Defending against bot fraud can be a never-ending task. Bots are readily available, simple to manipulate and easy to deploy. They are able to pick through business applications looking for any opportunity to profit.

Whilst it is impossible to achieve complete invulnerability, through implementing a holistic defence strategy that makes your applications a more challenging target, cyber criminals are much more likely to focus their attentions elsewhere. With that in mind, here are three ways to increase your chances of bot fraud prevention.

1) Application protection

The most complete defence an organisation can create is with a security device or service which is capable of harbouring full-proxy capabilities, such as a web application firewall (WAF). A WAF protects applications by applying a set of rules covering common cyber attacks, blocking malicious scripts and injections. To achieve this it acts as a buffer between the internet and your applications, helping to apply the right protections where they are most needed.

Not only does a WAF protect applications from vulnerable code and software, but it can also protect against bot-driven attacks by distinguishing between human and machine users by focusing on the attack tool, rather than the attack vector.

The comprehensive capabilities of WAF go a long stretch to protecting against bot fraud, with the placing of a WAF strategy at the central point of your organisation's network allowing other anti-fraud defences to be deployed. To ensure these advantages are fully capitalised however, the right conditions are needed within the organisation.

2) Create an awareness programme

Human interaction with software is only increasing, but many employees are not confident when dealing with bots. Bots are also becoming increasingly sophisticated which makes them difficult to identify even for employees who are familiar with the signs to look out for. As a result of employee inadequacies, holes can appear in the organisation's defence strategy which must be addressed if a WAF is to work effectively.

Implementing a continuous security and awareness program across the entire organisation can enable employees to keep up-to-date with bots. Employees will become aware of the threats they can cause and become versed in methods of protection, both for themselves as individuals and for the wider organisation.

3) Due diligence

Bots are constantly evolving to meet the demands of their users, and so it is critical that organisations also remain on their toes. In addition to the employee awareness programme that should be refreshed regularly, security patches particularly must be kept up-to-date, with unpatched networks a bullseye for malicious bots.

Organisations must also look internally to be able to combat malicious bots. By identifying where they are most vulnerable, they can develop an integrated security strategy across all departments. To help examine themselves, organisations can seek the help of a software partner who can offer a holistic solution to bot fraud, enabling application protection, tightening up network security, setting access controls, providing threat intelligence and endpoint inspection tools. This combination hands back control to the organisation, allowing them to shut down fraudulent activity before it has a serious impact on the business.

It's not abnormal for many of us to seek out the Wi-Fi network when entering a building, or a new place of work. For businesses, this can mean that the majority of their employees will have signed into corporate networks using mobile phones, tablets, and increasingly devices like smartwatches.

Research has suggested more than three-quarters of all organisations have more than a thousand business devices, including laptops and tablets supplied by the company, typically connected to the business network. It's difficult enough to manage the sheer number of endpoints without then taking into account the wider picture. Approximately a third of companies, 35%, in the UK, US and Germany responded suggesting that more than 5,000 non-business devices are connected to a corporate network each day, with 40% used for non-work-related tasks ranging from logging into social media platforms to downloading films and games.

Devices such as these, which haven't been organised by network and security teams, are part of a burgeoning issue for IT teams and are commonly referred to as shadow IT, or even stealth IT and rogue IT. The growth in cloud services has made the problem worse, and it's become more and more difficult for IT teams to understand exactly where business data is stored and which employees control what.

This isn't just about individuals hooking up their phones to corporate Wi-Fi networks, however. Shadow IT also comprises unofficial flows of data, including data that's exfiltrated from corporate networks on USB drives, or software that's installed without the support or knowledge of the IT department. This may even include software like an instant messaging tool that may make business communications easier.

Why is shadow IT a problem?

Aside from the issues around how employees in a company are spending their time, the bigger problem is that non-business devices often aren't installed with the security functions and standards of devices supplied or managed by an organisation.

Similarly, software and applications that haven't been authorised by IT may end up unwittingly presenting a security threat.

Even harmless apps on personal devices can carry hidden threats. In 2017, McAfee researchers identified 144 apps on the Google Play store that contained a malware strain called Grabos, which was disguised as seemingly harmless audio players, but had been downloaded up to 17 million times.

Shadow IT is a symptom of a wider problem; that employees are taking matters into their own hands when it comes to hardware or software they need in order to work effectively. Some of the most common shadow apps are instant messaging and file sharing apps such as Skype and Google Docs, which staff are installing and using in order to collaborate across the business.

Although using software like Google Docs may seem harmless on the surface, it opens up the risk of employees accidentally (or deliberately) leaving sensitive documents exposed online - the digital equivalent of leaving a document on the train. When staff leave, the IT department need to know that there are no stray files on non-business sharing systems that may have been forgotten about.

Shadow IT doesn't always have to be negative, however. Companies with a bring your own device (BYOD) policy are actively encouraging the use of personal technology in the workplace, often because the benefits of increased productivity and cost savings outweigh the risks. There are also ways that IT departments can reduce security risks with BYOD, including educating staff on secure passwords, encouraging installation of the latest updates and security patches on operating systems, and defining which applications can actually run on a corporate network.

One type of shadow IT that may grow to be a particular problem in businesses is IoT devices. Devices like connected kettles, digital assistants, smart TVs and even fitness trackers are growing in popularity, and all need an internet connection, which in a business, ends up being the enterprise network. There are well-reported issues with IoT devices at present, including the Mirai botnet which has grounded some of the world's biggest technology companies.

For some industries, shadow IT poses challenges around compliance. If data is being transmitted through unofficial channels, it can prove impossible to comply with initiatives like the GDPR, financial standards and data security principles.

Here are some other common implications of shadow IT that businesses may face:

• Inefficiencies and performance bottlenecks. If shadow IT systems are being used as well as or instead of existing systems, it can be difficult to identify more efficient work processes;
• Hidden costs from other workers needing to re-check the validity of data, and setting up systems and software without the necessary experience;
• Inconsistencies in both business logic and approach, with small differences and errors accumulating across versions of applications with no version control or linking between them;
• Risks of data loss or leaks, as data that goes through unauthorised applications or devices may not be subject to proper backup procedures, or authentication for appropriate access;
• Wasted investment in software that may be doing the same job in a business.

Business attitudes to shadow IT

Some businesses are very relaxed about shadow IT. They believe that the benefits brought by increased collaboration and innovation, particularly with the pace of change in technology, outweigh any direct security risks, and instead focus on educating employees to be able to identify threats.

Because of the way it encourages productivity and agility, shadow IT can also be used as a prototype for future workflows, technologies and systems that can then be approved in the future.

However, others see shadow IT as a risk to the way staff work, instead believing that it is better for tools to be implemented across an organisation to avoid information and workflow silos. It is also easier for the IT department to identify and combat threats if they're aware of what hardware and software is operating on the business' network.

Managing the risks of shadow IT

It's almost impossible to turn back the clock when it comes to shadow IT, and many staff would resent reverting to a highly locked-down IT environment, especially in a workplace which seeks to encourage collaboration.

Instead, IT professionals must look to manage shadow IT rather than fighting it. This can be done by making a comprehensive list of applications staff are using, and seeing how it varies across departments, which in turn can also be a good way to identify tools that the business can adopt 'officially'.

Endpoint management is one way to keep an eye on all assets and software on a business network. Once these have been identified, the next step is to ensure that these are in line with the company's policies, and to identify potential issues with any vulnerable applications.

Security awareness training can also be a valuable tool in an organisation's security strategy. Making staff aware of the dangers of clicking questionable links to the business network, even from their personal devices, can reduce incidents of carelessness. This is also a good opportunity to reinforce any company policies around personal device and application use, as well as existing software the business may already have access to.

Shadow IT in 2020

The events of 2020 have only accelerated the use of shadow IT as many businesses pivoted quickly to a remote-working model. For organisations that weren’t fully prepared for the pandemic and resulting lockdown, BYOD may have been the only way to allow for operations to continue in the absence of enough hardware to allow employees to continue to work from home.

Some workers may have turned to a series of unsanctioned apps as they sought to create new workflows after the severe disruption of not seeing their colleagues face-to-face or being able to take advantage of any on-premises resources they formerly relied upon. Currently we can’t even speak to our co-workers without the use of an app, so shadow IT systems will have proven invaluable in many situations to keep operations moving amid the disruption.

What this means for organisations and IT departments is that they must be especially vigilant for the vulnerabilities that can be caused by shadow IT in these suddenly hugely dispersed networks. While oversight might be harder under current working conditions, you need to make efforts to keep track of how your employees are working and to emphasise awareness and good practice in order to prevent shadow IT from becoming a serious problem for your organisation.

Machines have had the ability to engage in conversation with us for a number of years now. We may think of Alexa, Siri or Bixby today, but chatbots have been nattering away to us for years.

They're usually deployed online in retail or customer service guises, but they've become popular as apps and smartphone assistants too. With machine learning algorithms and hoards of conversational data, chatbots are smart software that sets out to mimic human conversation in either spoken or written responses.

Most are basic and just reply to online queries, but last year Microsoft unveiled its rather creepy chatbot that could book appointments over the phone. It fooled the human on the other end of the line by adding 'erm' between sentences. It may seem a dumb and limited technology at present but it's an area of technology that's rapidly growing and its capabilities are becoming more and more intelligent.

In 2017, a company called Luka caught the attention of the worlds media when it made a chatbot from the text messages of a dead man. Before that, Microsoft had a chatbot released over Twitter, called Tay Tweets, that had to be taken down the same day after it was hacked to post racist content.

It was a far cry from the ELIZA chatbot developed by MIT in 1966, that worked by pairing words with a list of possible responses.

From 1966 to today, many chatbots have been created to varying success, to the point that it's now commonplace for a chatbot to be on an everyday device, like Siri on iPhones and Bixby on Samsung's Galaxy range. The next evolution of that is the home assistant with Amazon Echo's Alexa and Google Home both becoming popular fixtures in domestic life.

Most social media sites allow for chatbot integration, which led to the most alarming use of the technology; Microsoft's Tay launched on Twitter with machine learning capabilities. The chatbot had the ability to digest other Twitter user's messages and mimic them.

This proved to have an unexpected result as many Twitter users began feeding bigotry content that the bot then mimicked, much to Microsoft's horror. The intelligence of the bot saw it learn about racism, tweet out some rather abhorrent tweets and be shut down all within 16 hours.

Chatbots are arguably the most human use of AI and are having a big impact on businesses around the world.

The journey has just begun

Laurent Roussel, business technologist at software corporation CA Technologies, says the chatbot journey has just begun and sees great potential for businesses. In particular, he says, they could revolutionise the way IT support systems are run and make them smarter. Firms can also expand sales channels by implementing chatbots.

"Chatbots open up a whole new world of possibilities for businesses and we are just at the start of this journey. While currently geared towards customer-facing applications, chatbots could have a big impact on the enterprise, for example as IT support systems. Features such as being available 24/7 and the ability to scale at peak times make them very well suited," Roussel says.

"Chatbots can be advantageous for many reasons, but a logical development of the current bots seems to be as an extended sales channel. Using a chatbot in this circumstance means companies can enhance their sales models by increasing sales at a lower cost.

"Advances in machine learning and analytics also mean that the technology can trawl through thousands of knowledge articles and databases, allowing the bot to recommend the best fix to any problem encountered by the business user, with minimum productivity loss."

Although there are fears that chatbots will replace humans in the future, they could also result in the creation of new jobs and opportunities.

"As with most disruptive technologies, introduction of chatbots can result in job roles disappearing and being replaced with automation and AI," Roussel adds.

"However, new technologies can also encourage the creation and emergence of new roles. While these roles may not yet have been thought of, they do present those who may have initially lost out to AI with new, exciting opportunities."

Big for customer service

For chatbots to be a success, it's crucial they follow the conventions of human conversation, and they're already showing they can do that. Customer service is an area where this skill is desperately needed, as questions always need to be answered. Bots, many believe, will become a common part of customer service operations in the future. Merijn te Booij, chief marketing officer at Genesys, is one of those people.

"From a customer service point-of-view, bots have the potential to add incredible value to the customer journey--both from a business and customer experience perspective," he tells IT Pro. "Research from Forrester shows that 70% of customers often prefer to resolve issues themselves, if at all possible.

"This is where bots can step in. Simple interactions such as appointment setting and troubleshooting can be resolved quickly and efficiently without wasting customer time or straining valuable business resources."

While they offer great potential, he predicts that chatbots will support humans in their jobs and won't replace them completely. "Whether or not bots can completely eclipse the human touch, however, is yet to be determined," he says. "The technological potential is certainly there, but we see bots as a way of making humans more effective and more valuable to resolve the more complex and demanding cases where they're needed most."

Improving customer engagement

Evan Wray, co-founder and vice president of mobile engagement platform Swyft Media, says bots are helping companies engage with customers more effectively.

"There's a huge opportunity for companies to engage with customers in new ways, and in the place they spend the most time," Wray says.

"Bots allow companies to become a part of the conversation -- rather than an interruption, and reach customers in a way that is one-to-one, highly scalable and with a personalised approach. Bots provide value and can ease customer frustration.

"Flight delays or gate changes are annoying to flyers. But a bot that alerts them of a change or problem and can connect them directly to customer service will help ease some of that pain," he explains.

New ways of working

Mike Crooks, head of Mubaloo Innovation Lab, says it's understandable that chatbots are beginning to take over; consumers are using technology more than ever, so to communicate with intelligent systems makes sense. They also introduce new ways of working for businesses.

"With the consumerisation of IT, where consumers comfortably use technology like smartphones, there is the expectation of intuitive experiences and simple to use interfaces -- which is not reflected in the technology solutions these consumers use at work. Bots present a fundamental step in the evolution of tech user experience and could help drive advancements in this area in the enterprise," says Crooks.

"The opportunity for enterprise bots is vast, as is the potential for the technology to gain mass adoption at a faster pace than we are seeing in the consumer market. Bots will help streamline operations, automate tasks and eventually start using cognitive learning to transform the business decisions we make, the speed at which work can be delivered and possibly the very nature of our jobs."

A route to digital transformation

The power of chatbots and indeed machine learning software can be seen with Marks & Spencer's recent move to replace its call centre staff with AI-powered chatbots designed to quickly deal with customer complaints.

M&S said that 100 employees who work across its 13 UK call centres will not be losing their jobs and instead will be reassigned to in-store roles to offer face-to-face services on the shop floor.

The move is part of M&S' embracing of digital transformation, whereby legacy IT infrastructure and operations are replaced with digital services and more advanced technology.

"We know that M&S needs to modernise," said Chris McGrath, IT programme manager at M&S. "We have a lot of backstage resources sitting in switchboards that manually handle these calls. We're getting them away from that backstage onto the shop floor, talking to the customers, as they should be."

Powered by cloud communication service Twilio, the chatbots are set to be in place by the end of September. The technology will also be deployed in 640 M&S stores as well, although it's currently unclear in what capacity it will be used.

Carrying out specialised tasks

Mark Armstrong, managing director of EMEA at IT development firm Progress, says we have been interacting with bots for years, but they're quickly advancing. Companies can use them to undertake specialist tasks and increase efficiency across the board, he says.

"Bots, specifically chatbots, are being hailed as the next big thing, replacing the need for downloadable apps. Integrated into an already viable platform, a bot can do things that a normal human chat wouldn't necessarily be able to accomplish easily, like check the local weather, order pizza, or hail a cab," says Armstrong.

"Whether we realise it or not, we have been interacting with bots, especially voice bots, for some time now. The somewhat annoying voice-prompter of some airline support lines (the ones that have enough voice-recognition) is a great example.

"Third-party companies are understandably starting to leverage bots to perform specialised tasks, such as check bank account balances or order plane tickets via text prompts. This increased automation and administration of business rules increases the efficiency of business processes, reducing dependency on IT and improving the overall agility of their operations."

Troubleshooting problems

Chatbots aren't just limited to providing support and services to customers. One day, they will also have the ability to aid firms in ensuring their IT infrastructure is functioning and capable of handling day-to-day tasks. Michael Hack, SVP of EMEA operations at software development company Ipswitch, says bots will be able to identify complex tech problems and help fix them in the future.

"Further into the future, the artificial intelligence that underpins chatbots and much of MIT's current work could be able to offer more support to businesses and deliver a new wave of truly intelligent networks that constantly troubleshoot for IT problems and keep the infrastructure running smoothly," he says.

"We think that the banking, finance and insurance sectors will be some of the first to adopt this kind of technology as part of their network security and cyber-defence systems, with the retail sector - especially those retailers with an online presence - not at all far behind."

The chatbot may be seen as a futuristic tech trend, but the fact is, it's an area that's already garnering major interest. And a lot of it is coming from businesses. Right now, these bots are doing great things in customer services, but as the innovation behind them improves, firms can expect them to do even more in the foreseeable future.

Researchers have uncovered a sophisticated botnet perpetuating a cryptocurrency scam in one of the most wide-reaching studies of the Twitter ecosystem to date.

Comprised of at least 15,000 bots in a three-tiered hierarchical structure, a team of Duo Security researchers observed how the crypto-scam botnet worked to spread a fake 'cryptocurrency giveaway', and evolved over time to remain undetected.

Duo's principal R&D engineer Jordan Wright and data scientist Olabode Anise published their findings in a report titled 'Dont @ Me: Hunting Twitter Bots at Scale', ahead of a presentation at the 2018 Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas tomorrow.

As part of the process, the researchers analysed more than 88 million Twitter accounts - one of the largest random Twitter datasets to date - between May and July 2018, and processed their APIs in a machine learning model to differentiate a human account from a bot.

The crypto-giveaway botnet, according to Duo, would first involve bots spoofing a legitimate cryptocurrency-associated account by stealing its display name and avatar. These accounts would subsequently spread fake links in replies to genuine users' tweets, and were also seen to take on the identity of a celebrity, or news organisation.

The team then learned many of them followed the same Twitter accounts, declared "hub accounts". They were unclear as to the exact contribution these accounts made to the botnet, but theorised they are "randomly chosen accounts which the bots follow in an effort to appear legitimate".

Amplification bots, fake accounts that exist purely to like tweets to artificially inflate their popularity and visibility, comprised the final tier of this structure and were deployed to raise the prominence of the tweets promoting the scam, as well as afford them legitimacy.

They mapped the relationship between the amplification bots, and the bots they support, to discover previously unknown accounts; in turn performing further analysis to unravel a sophisticated structure. In this process they established it was possible to follow a thread "that can result in the unraveling of the entire botnet".

"Users are likely to trust a tweet more or less depending on how many times it's been retweeted or liked. Those behind this particular botnet know this, and have designed it to exploit this very tendency," Duo's Anise said.

"Malicious bot detection and prevention is a cat-and-mouse game," Wright added. "We anticipate that enlisting the help of the research community will enable discovery of new and improving techniques for tracking bots. However, this is a more complex problem than many realize, and as our paper shows, there is still work to be done."

The tools and techniques the pair used to uncover the cryptocurrency scam botnet, which they are set to highlight at Black Hat, are being made publicly available via Github following their presentation.

Although botnets can be structured in different ways, the paper noted the structure and appearance of this particular one resembled the 'diet-spam botnet' discovered by Symantec in 2015 - with dedicated roles assigned to different clusters. Alternatively, botnets may exist in a 'flat' structure where each fake account exhibits the same behaviour.

"Twitter is aware of this form of manipulation and is proactively implementing a number of detections to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner," a company spokesperson said.

"Spam and certain forms of automation are against Twitter's rules. In many cases, spammy content is hidden on Twitter on the basis of automated detections.

"When spammy content is hidden on Twitter from areas like search and conversations, that may not affect its availability via the API. This means certain types of spam may be visible via Twitter's API even if it is not visible on Twitter itself. Less than 5% of Twitter accounts are spam-related."

Writing in a blogpost, the principal researchers said they were pleased with Twitter's initial response to their findings, and the company's announcement that it would be challenging "more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week".

"We're excited to see these efforts by Twitter and are hopeful that these increased investments will be effective in combating spam and malicious content," the pair wrote.

"However, we don't consider the problem solved. The case study presented in this paper demonstrates that organized botnets are still active and can be discovered with relatively straightforward analysis."

Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability in Cisco switches deployed in data centres across the world to leave politically-motivated messages, according to researchers.

Although the scale of the attack has yet to be determined, Talos, Cisco's cybersecurity arm, has identified more than 168,000 IoT devices with the vulnerability, with analysis by Kaspersky Lab suggesting the attack is mostly targeting the Russian-speaking portion of the internet, impacting entire internet providers and data centres.

A bot is searching for vulnerable Cisco switches via the Internet of Things (IoT) search engine Shodan, according to Kaspersky, and once it finds a vulnerability, can exploit the Cisco Smart Install Client software.

The flaw allows attackers to run arbitrary code on the vulnerable switches, before they are able to rewrite the Cisco IOS image and change the configuration file. Devices then boot up with the message "don't mess with our elections" and an image of the United States flag, before the switch becomes unavailable.

Image credit: Kaspersky

Cisco Talos threat researcher Nick Biasini warned that network administrators need to be especially vigilant, suggesting the simplest way to mitigate these issues is to run the command novstack on the affected device.

He said: "It can be easy to 'set and forget' these devices, as they are typically highly stable and rarely changed. Combine this with the advantages that an attacker has when controlling a network device, and routers and switches become very tempting targets."

Cisco has strongly recommended all customers review their architecture, and use tools provided by Talos to scan their network and remove Cisco Smart Install Client from all devices in instances where it's not being used.

While Talos believes attackers are "associated with nation-state actors", screenshots posted on Twitter by one affected user indicates a group named 'JHT' has claimed responsibility.

Reuters, meanwhile, reported a statement from the Iranian Communication and Information Technology Ministry that says the attack has affected 3,500 switches in Iran.

The Smart Client vulnerability dates back to February of last year, where Cisco first became aware of a significant increase in scans attempting to detect devices where the Smart Install feature remained enabled and without proper security controls, after setup was completed.

Smart Install was initially designed to make life easier for system administrators by allowing remote configuration and OS image management on Cisco switches. By design, these do not require authentication.

Kaspersky Labs suggests it may be a problem of data centres that fail to limit access to the TCP 4786 port, which needs to be open for the Smart Install to work, or to disable Smart Install once it is no longer in use.

Picture credit: Bigstock

Vodafone aims to use 4G and the Internet of Things to track drones that could present a risk to aircraft.

The telecom giant has announced trials of its air traffic control drone tracking and safety system, which combines a Radio Positioning System (RPS) alongside algorithms it has developed to track and control drones that may be wandering too close to a plane's flight path.

The technology is embedded in drones via a 4G modem and SIM, allowing them to be tracked in real time from a distance of up to 50 metres.

If an operator thinks the drones are creeping too close to a danger zone, the controller can be intercepted and authorities can override the controls, landing them safely if necessary.

"This groundbreaking innovation by Vodafone will help to ensure the skies stay safe as drones become ubiquitous, everywhere," Vodafone Group chief technology officer, Johan Wibergh, said.

The popularity of drones is seen as an increasing safety threat to commercial flights, with a near miss between a drone and a plane at Gatwick Airport last summer forcing authorities to close the runway and divert flights. The government also introduced measures last summer designed to improve accountability, that mean drone owners must register their machines.

Not only could the drones be intercepted should they pose a danger to other aircraft, they could also be stopped if it seems they're being used for illegal activity, such as smuggling contraband supplies into prisons or drug smuggling, Vodafone said.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has collaborated closely with Vodafone on the plans to ensure the system adheres to its new rules that will regulate how drones are operated.

"The European Commission supports all trials aimed at realising our U-space vision for safe commercial drone operations in the EU there is a growing network of demonstrations and projects across the EU," deputy director general of the commission, Matthew Baldwin, said. "We look forward to hearing the results of Vodafone's work."

The drone safety system has already been tested briefly at the end of 2017, when it was used to successfully control a 0.3m wingspan, 2kg X-UAV drone around Sevilla in Spain. The further trials will take place in Spain and Germany throughout 2018. Vodafone hopes its technology will be ready for commercial use from next year.

Hundreds of thousands of Deutsche Telekom customers were affected by what was said to be a failed hacking attempt on consumer router devices, Reuters reported.

Deutsche Telekom confirmed that around 900,000 customers had their broadband disconnected following the attempted hack of its hardware. This was around 4.5% of its customer base.

Customers experienced disruptions to broadband connections, including mobile line, TV or internet services.

The problems started on Sunday at 14:00 GMT and continued until Monday. Network monitoring website allestoerungen.de reported tens of thousands of complaints in different parts of Germany.

Deutsche Telekom head of IT Security, Thomas Tschersich told German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that the issues experienced seemed to be connected to an attempt to make a number of customers' routers part of the Mirai botnet.

He said: "In the framework of the attack, it was attempted to turn the routers into a part of a botnet. While this was unsuccessful, the routers crashed in the attempt to take over."

Mirai is malware that attempts to turn network devices into remotely controlled bots. These bots can ultimately be used for large-scale DDoS attacks.

Jerry Goodman, vice president of the government systems division at communications company ViaSat, said: "This hack only further emphasises the weaknesses that exist in our increasingly connected world. In this case, consumers have been cut off from their internet, phone and TV, but it could've been worse."

Goodman added: "For instance, dedicated attackers could cut off not only residential internet, but traffic and train signals, or water and energy supplies. A sobering thought."

Telekom offered firmware patches for some of its routers on Monday, particularly two models produced by Arcadyan Technology.

Government sources told Reuters that German Security officials said the problem appeared to have been caused by hackers.

To customers experiencing problems, Deutsche Telekom suggest to unplug their router, wait 30 seconds and restart it. If the issue persists, it advised to disconnect the router from the network entirely.

Goodman said: "To protect against these attacks, organisations must assume that every single part of their network infrastructure is a potential vulnerability, and mitigate against this. For instance, by teaching both workers and customers best security practices; by monitoring systems to detect unusual behaviour and having their systems react before damage can be done; by controlling the access any one user or device has to critical systems; and by adding multiple layers of encryption, so that potential damage can be minimised."

Microsoft is giving us more bots to chat with on Skype - including a Spock Bot to teach us the Vulcan ways.

The tech giant unveiled a preview of the bots in April, saying more than 30,000 developers have tried building bots on the preview platform since then.

The company has said it believes natural language interfaces such as its own Cortana and chatbots will be how we interact with computers in the near future.

Alongside the two dozen or so existing preview bots, the Microsoft-owned VoIP and messaging company worked with a series of partners to build five more AI helpers to further encourage the rise of the bots.

The five bots come from flight aggregation site Skyscanner, ticket seller StubHub, IoT automation tool IFTTT, travel booker Hipmunk and Star Trek character Spock.

The Skyscanner bot will let you search for flights by simply typing "Paris in July", while StubHub offers a similar experience to let you find and book tickets. Hipmunk lets you find flights, hotels and travel advice using natural language in a chat client rather than via a structured search.

IFTTT is particularly interesting, allowing users to use triggers on the automation site to send themselves messages, such as social media notifications or smart home alerts, like if someone is at their door.

And then there is Spock. "You can even take a virtual Trek to the stars," Skype said in a blog post. "Chat with Spock, second in command of the USS Enterprise, to learn the ways of Vulcan logic." He's not much for conversation, but will instead try to walk you through a lesson on the rational ways of his people.

To use the bots, you will need the most recent version of the Skype app on your platform of choice - Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android - or try them out online at the Skype Bots website.

More bots are on the way, Skype said, adding that a recent hackathon saw ideas from helping you buy health insurance to picking a song to fit your mood.

As of July, Microsoft added three new features to its Skype bot platform: support for group conversations, so your entire family can talk to a travel bot at once; easier switching between webpages and different apps; and cards of information, such as travel destinations or ticket orders.

Skype is not the only messaging tool to look at chatbots, with Facebook also unveiling a bot platform earlier this year and even Sage creating a "funny" accounting chatbot.

Microsoft released its chatbot Tay on Twitter with mixed success - and a fair amount of rude comments.

Picture courtesy of CWMc

Banks and online retailers are being increasingly targeted by bots, a report by ThreatMetrix has revealed.

Research carried out for its Q1 Cybercrime Report showed 35 per cent more attacks occurred over the last 90 days than in previous periods, although 311 million of these were stopped.

ThreatMetrix said it is increasingly finding hackers are using "low and slow attacks" to target banks and online retailers, which have the potential to evade detection because they look like genuine users, rather than fraudsters.

One of the reasons criminals are deciding to use this approach is because so much hacked personal information is available for them to buy from the dark web. This data can then be used to attack institutions as if they were real people.

"Consumer data is everywhere. Fraudsters can create pitch-perfect attacks because they know so much about us," Vanita Pandey, vice president of strategy and product marketing at ThreatMetrix, said.

The attacks are harder to detect because they are not always picked up by traditional control measures, meaning the usual ways of finding and reacting to threats aren't working anymore, Pandey added.

"The challenge for digital businesses today is that cybercriminals are becoming so sophisticated at building convincing identities using a jigsaw of stolen credential pieces, it is becoming harder than ever to distinguish them from legitimate customers," continued Pandey.

"It is only by looking holistically at the context of the transaction, along with all the information we know about the user, that organisations have the power to stop fraudsters in their tracks."

She said businesses must become smarter at detecting every type of attack, including automated identity testing sessions and those that seemingly hijack individual accounts.

"This starts with really understanding the digital identities of consumers so that high-risk behaviour can be detected in real-time," she explained.

Another way businesses can help to quash the threat is by developing tools that can work out the difference between a human and a bot before the risk becomes a problem.