Summary
Bots and other automated scripts frequently submit web forms, not always with overtly malicious intent, but often to achieve various goals that can negatively impact businesses. Their motivations range from data exploitation and system disruption to generating fake leads or even burying important notifications.
Key findings
- System exploitation: Bots may overload servers or trigger errors to expose system vulnerabilities, which can then be used for further compromise.
- Email flooding: A common tactic involves submitting many forms to a single email address to bury legitimate security alerts or other important notifications, facilitating account takeovers.
- Data pollution: Bots often fill forms with random data, gibberish, or even stolen information, which can skew analytics and waste business resources. This practice affects data quality and can lead to businesses chasing false leads, as highlighted by WPForms in their guide on preventing bot submissions.
- Untargeted activity: Many bots simply crawl the internet, filling out any forms they encounter without specific targeting, leading to widespread but often low-quality spam.
- Spam trap hits: Submitting fake or invalid email addresses can result in hits on spam traps, which negatively impacts sender reputation and overall email deliverability.
Key considerations
- Form security measures: Implementing CAPTCHAs, honeypots, and other bot detection mechanisms is essential to prevent automated submissions.
- Robust validation: Ensure server-side validation is in place to filter out clearly fake or malformed data before it pollutes your database.
- IP and behavioral monitoring: Regularly monitor originating IP addresses and user behavior patterns (e.g., submission speed) to identify suspicious activity.
- Proactive protection: Safeguarding your email list signup forms from bots and subscription bombing is crucial for maintaining list hygiene and deliverability.
What email marketers say
Email marketers frequently encounter fake form submissions, which cause a cascade of problems from skewed analytics to wasted sales efforts. They recognize that these issues stem from a mix of automated bot activity, human fraud, and even legitimate users intentionally providing false information to bypass unwanted follow-ups.
Key opinions
- Resource drain: Fake leads from bot submissions consume valuable time from sales and marketing teams, who then follow up on non-existent prospects.
- Data integrity risk: Spam submissions pollute databases, distorting key metrics and making it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance or segment audiences.
- Deliverability damage: Sending emails to bot-generated or otherwise invalid addresses leads to high bounce rates and spam trap hits, significantly harming sender reputation and email deliverability.
- Human-generated traps: Some customers intentionally input fake email addresses (e.g., keyboard smashes) to access gated content without receiving follow-up communications, inadvertently creating spam traps.
- Incentive fraud: Lead generation models that pay per signup create an incentive for bad actors to submit fake data, either through bots or human farms, to inflate their earnings.
Key considerations
- Source evaluation: Thoroughly vet lead sources, especially those with performance-based compensation, to ensure data quality and prevent fraud.
- Multi-layered defense: Combine CAPTCHAs with advanced behavioral analytics and server-side validation to detect and block both sophisticated bots and human-powered fraud.
- List hygiene: Implement regular email list cleaning and validation processes to remove invalid or suspicious entries, safeguarding your sender reputation.
- User experience balance: Consider user motivations for providing false data, and explore ways to balance data capture with consumer control over communications.
Marketer from Email Geeks explains motivations: Bots have numerous "hacker reasons" for interacting with web forms. One primary goal is to try and overload the webform server, hoping to trigger errors (like a stack trace) that might reveal vulnerabilities. This exposure could then be exploited to further compromise the system or gain unauthorized access.
Marketer from Email Geeks on deliverability hijacking: Another significant reason bots submit forms is to hijack a legitimate company's email deliverability. They do this by flooding an email address (often one tied to a compromised account) with a large volume of junk emails. The intent of this "email bomb" is to bury any important security notifications or alerts, making it harder for the account owner to detect malicious activity like an account takeover.
What the experts say
Experts emphasize that the motivations behind bots submitting web forms are often complex and extend beyond simple spamming. These range from probing for system vulnerabilities and facilitating account takeovers to manipulating data for financial gain or causing reputational damage. Understanding these diverse objectives is crucial for developing effective defensive strategies.
Key opinions
- Reconnaissance: Bots might test forms to identify system vulnerabilities, such as revealing stack traces or other errors that could aid in future attacks.
- Account compromise facilitation: Flooding an inbox with junk mail can be a precursor to an account takeover, helping bad actors bury legitimate security alerts sent to the true account owner.
- Financial fraud: In affiliate or lead generation models where payment is per lead, bots or human farms are often employed to generate fake sign-ups for fraudulent financial gain.
- Reputation degradation: Repeated submission of malicious or nonsensical data can severely harm a domain's sender reputation, potentially leading to its inclusion on a blocklist or blacklist, which can be monitored with blocklist checking tools.
Key considerations
- Behavioral analytics: Instead of relying solely on simple CAPTCHAs, analyze user behavior patterns to distinguish bots from legitimate human interactions, especially for multi-step funnels.
- Payment model scrutiny: Businesses should critically review payment structures for lead generation to remove any incentives that encourage fraudulent or artificial submissions.
- Continuous monitoring: Proactively monitor all form submissions, associated IP addresses, and email engagement metrics for anomalies that could indicate bot activity or human-powered fraud.
- Layered defense strategies: A multi-layered approach combining various detection and prevention methods offers stronger protection than relying on a single security solution, as discussed by ClickCease.
Expert from SpamResource clarifies bot intentions: Bots don't typically fill out forms without a purpose; their actions, even seemingly random ones, usually serve a broader malicious or exploitative goal. This could involve probing for system weaknesses, distributing spam, or creating fake accounts for later use. Understanding these underlying motives is crucial for effective defense.
Expert from Word to the Wise on list poisoning: Bots are often used to intentionally "poison" email lists by submitting invalid or bot-controlled addresses through web forms. This tactic aims to degrade the quality of a sender's list, leading to higher bounce rates, increased spam complaints, and ultimately, damage to sender reputation. Such actions can significantly impact email deliverability.
What the documentation says
Technical documentation often details the vulnerabilities bots exploit and outlines the preventative measures available. These resources provide foundational knowledge on how to design secure web forms, emphasizing robust validation, rate limiting, and the implementation of challenges to distinguish between human and automated interactions.
Key findings
- Public accessibility: Web forms are inherently public and thus common targets for automated scripts due to their direct impact on data and communication systems.
- Automation advantage: Bots use automated scripts to fill and submit forms at speeds far beyond human capability, enabling large-scale attacks or data pollution.
- Validation gaps: A lack of proper server-side input validation can allow bots to inject malicious code, overwhelming data, or bypass basic checks.
- No rate limiting: Without proper rate limiting, a single bot can flood a form endpoint with an excessive number of requests, potentially leading to denial-of-service or database overload.
Key considerations
- Server-side security: Implement robust server-side validation and sanitization for all form inputs to prevent data corruption and code injection.
- Honeypot fields: Utilize invisible honeypot fields that are hidden from human users but visible to bots, signaling automated activity if filled.
- Time-based analysis: Monitor the time taken to complete a form; extremely fast submissions are a strong indicator of bot activity.
- Advanced challenges: Employ JavaScript-based challenges or advanced CAPTCHA solutions to effectively differentiate between human users and bots, enhancing form security as detailed by Captcha.eu.
Documentation from ClickGuard explains bot functionality: Form bots are automated programs designed to interact with web forms by submitting fake entries. Their primary functions include skewing analytics, wasting valuable operational resources, and potentially causing disruptions through high-volume submissions. They can mimic human interaction to varying degrees of sophistication.
Documentation from CHEQ outlines content access: Bots can be utilized to access gated content on websites, such as whitepapers or reports, by flooding online forms with fake or stolen consumer data. This means that valuable content is accessed without generating legitimate leads, and the associated data provides no real or useful insights for the business.
