What Are Click Bots?

Click bots are a type of software that is designed to simulate the actions of human users clicking on ads, links, and other types of web content. Some click bots can be helpful, but most are used to perform ad fraud, or click fraud. While the primary motive for deploying click bot scams is financial gain, some hackers may also use click bots to inflict damage on advertisers without making any money themselves.

Bots are computer programs that are designed to perform highly repetitive tasks with great speed and accuracy, and without human intervention. Bots like chatbots provide helpful information for users, while bots like spam bots are designed for more nefarious purposes. Click bots are programmed to simulate real human clicks on web pages and display ads. They may be simple programs running on a single machine. Or they may be highly complex operations that use botnets and automation to generate massive amounts of bot traffic, making it appear as if thousands of users are visiting a site and clicking on ads and links.

Basic click bots can be programmed to simply click on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, while sophisticated click bots can evade detection by mimicking the actions of human users like performing certain mouse movements, lingering on an image, or pausing between ad clicks.

The earliest click bots like Clickbot.A were powered by 100,000 machines and caused an estimated $50,000 worth of fraud. More recent click bots like Methbot reportedly used more than 850,000 false IP addresses and earned up to $5 million per day for its operators by generating fake video ad impressions.

Click bots can help criminals commit click fraud in a variety of ways.

• Owners of websites and social media accounts may use click bots to artificially inflate the number of clicks and click-through rates for their sites, allowing them to collect a large payout for fake clicks and to charge more for advertisers and ad networks who place ads on their sites.
• Hackers may use click bots to inflict financial damage on a targeted advertiser by repeatedly clicking on PPC ads or Google ads on sites, causing the advertiser to have to pay for clicks that, in reality, have no benefit in advertising exposure.
• Companies may use click bots to repeatedly click on the ads of competitors to drain their advertising budget without any return on their investment.
• Misinformation campaigns may artificially increase likes or upvotes to posts on social media to make certain personalities or statements seem more popular than they actually are.
• Cybercriminals may use click bots to rack up fraudulent clicks that improve the search engine rankings of malicious web pages, increasing their ability to distribute malware and ransomware to unsuspecting users.

While click bots pose a definite threat, they can also be used for helpful purposes. Anti-spam, anti-malware, and anti-ransomware solutions may use click bots to click on every link in an email before it’s delivered to its intended recipients, ensuring that the message is not spam and does not contain any type of ransomware or malware. Click bots can also help web teams to monitor the user experience on websites by regularly clicking on all links to ensure that they work.

Click bots that go undetected can result in a variety of adverse impacts.

• Wasted ad budgets. Click bots and click fraud cost ad networks and advertisers billions of dollars each year as they waste their ad spend on fake traffic.
• Poor marketing decisions. Digital marketers make many campaign and budget decisions based on metrics and analytics derived from clicks. When a significant portion of clicks cannot be attributed to real people, marketing campaigns are more likely to make decisions based on bot clicks instead of what will resonate with real human users.
• Ineffective retargeting. By pretending to be real viewers clicking on links on websites, click bots can cause retargeting campaigns to waste large chunks of budget retargeting ads for visitors that do not not exist.

Detecting click bot activity requires security teams to monitor for anomalies in irregular patterns in internet traffic that suggest activity may not be normal human behavior. This may include intervals between clicks that are too short, a lack of natural mouse movements, many clicks from the same IP addresses, or unusually high conversion rates on a web page. Other signs of click bot activity include abnormally high page views, surges in traffic from unexpected locations, unusually high bounce rates, and surprisingly high or low time on site.

Superior bot monitoring solutions frequently use threat intelligence, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to analyze the consistency of user behavior, and CAPTCHA technology to differentiate human users from bots.

Defending against click bot attacks requires a multifaceted approach to security.

• Bot detection services. Leading security providers offer bot management solutions that use advanced algorithms and ML to identify and block click bots and click fraud in real time.
• Continuous monitoring and analysis. Advertisers can monitor ad campaigns to search for suspicious activity and investigate signs of click bot traffic.
• Exclusion or blocklists. Exclusion lists document known sources of bot traffic and prevent ads from being served to these addresses.
• Verification technology. Solutions like two-factor authentication for user actions and sophisticated CAPTCHA technology help to differentiate real users from bots.