How Bots Attack Your Application and Why You Probably Missed It


Imagine someone finding a spare key under your home's doormat just by guessing. This is similar to how bot operators take advantage of overlooked application vulnerabilities. Towards the upcoming holidays -I have gathered three hacker tutorials from the Darknet published in the second half of 2024. In this blog post, I’ll share my insights about bot operators' tactics, techniques, and procedures to bypass your application's defenses. Let's take a closer look at the clever tactics employed by bot operators to infiltrate your applications and understand why these methods often go unnoticed.

1. Cloaking Their Presence with the SOCKS Protocol

Cloaking Their Presence with the SOCKS Protocol

Bot Operators are experts at hiding their identity, and one of their primary tools is the SOCKS5 protocol.

SOCKS5 is an internet protocol that routes network traffic between a client (like a bot) and a server through a proxy server. Imagine sending your mail through a middleman who hides your return address.

Threat Cases:

  • Anonymity and Location Masking: Bot operators can conceal their real IP addresses (unique identifiers for devices on the Internet) by sending their traffic through SOCKS5 proxies. This makes it appear that their bots are accessing your application from legitimate users in various locations worldwide.
  • Bypassing Network Barriers: SOCKS5 can tunnel through firewalls and network filters, allowing bots to reach parts of your network that might otherwise be inaccessible.

How This Affects Your Application:

By masking their activities, bot operators make it difficult for standard security systems to detect and block their malicious traffic. This stealth approach allows them to gather data, scrape content, or perform automated actions without triggering alarms.

2. Exploiting Unintentionally Exposed Information

Exploiting Unintentionally Exposed Information

Information is power, and bot operators know where to find it.

How Do They Find Exposed Data?

  • Search Engine Dorking: This involves using advanced search techniques to find confidential documents, files, or data that have been accidentally made public online. For example, they might search for specific file types or keywords that indicate sensitive information.
  • Mining Code Repositories: Developers store code on platforms like GitHub. Sometimes, developers inadvertently include sensitive information like passwords or API keys (access tokens for services) in their code. Bot operators scan these repositories to find such leaks.
  • Analyzing Website Code: Threat actors can extract hidden information not intended for public view by examining websites' underlying code, especially JavaScript code that runs in the browser.

Threat Cases:

  • Unauthorized Access: Bot operators can access systems and data they shouldn't have with exposed credentials or keys.
  • Deeper System Understanding: Threat actors' Access to internal documents or code helps them understand how your application works, making finding and exploiting weaknesses easier.

How This Affects You:

These data exposures act like spare keys under the doormat, giving bot operators easy access to your systems. This can lead to data breaches, unauthorized transactions, or malicious activities.

3. Enhancing Bots with Artificial Intelligence

Enhancing Bots with Artificial Intelligence

Bot operators now leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make their bots more competent and effective.

What Is AI in This Context?

AI refers to computer systems that can perform tasks usually requiring human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognizing patterns, or making decisions.

Threat Cases:

  • Generating Human-Like Interactions: Using AI models called Large Language Models (LLMs), bots can generate text that mimics human speech, making automated interactions seem genuine.
  • Automating Complex Tasks: unlike security research – hackers usually don’t have a team of dedicated professionals. He must hire someone to outsource hacking operations and spend money or search online. AI solves this “lone wolf” problem by acting as a “multi-disciplinary go-to person”: ChatGPT and Claud are used by threat actors to:
    • Analyze and deconstruct code
    • Solve bugs
    • Captcha solving
    • De-obfuscate low-level obfuscated code
    • Learning and Adapting: AI-powered bots can learn from previous interactions to improve performance.

How This Affects Your Application:

By integrating AI, bots become more challenging to distinguish from real users. They can bypass security measures that rely on detecting automated behavior, engage in more sophisticated attacks, and require more advanced defenses to detect and block.

4. Bypassing Security Measures with Advanced SSH Techniques

Bypassing Security Measures with Advanced SSH Techniques

To reach targets behind fortified defenses, bot operators employ sophisticated network methods.

What Is SSH?

SSH, or Secure Shell, is a protocol for securely connecting to computers over a network. It's like having a secure tunnel between two devices.

Threat Use Cases:

  • SSH Tunneling and Port Forwarding: Operators create secure pathways to access internal services not exposed to the Internet, effectively bypassing firewalls and other security barriers.
  • Using SSH as a Proxy: By routing their traffic through SSH connections, they encrypt their activities, making it harder for monitoring systems to detect malicious behavior.
  • Combining SSH with Tor: Tor is a network that anonymizes internet traffic. By combining SSH with Tor, operators add layers of anonymity, making their activities even more challenging to trace.
  • Circumventing Captcha and JavaScript Challenges: Many websites use tests like Captchas (those "I'm not a robot" checkboxes) or JavaScript challenges to distinguish bots from humans. Using these SSH techniques, bots can relay traffic through browsers that solve these challenges, appearing as legitimate users.

How This Affects You:

These methods are like secret passages into your application, allowing bots to access protected content and functions without being detected by standard security measures.

5. Outsmarting Defenses with Sandboxing

Outsmarting Defenses with Sandboxing

When confronted with challenges designed to block bots, operators turn to sandboxing.

What Is Sandboxing?

Sandboxing involves running code in a controlled, isolated environment that mimics a natural system but doesn't affect the actual system. It's like practicing a lock combination on a replica safe before opening the real one.

Use Cases and Benefits:

  • Solving JavaScript Challenges: Some websites use complex JavaScript code to verify a user's authenticity. Bots run this code in a sandbox to obtain the necessary tokens or cookies to prove they passed the test.
  • Avoiding Detection: By executing code in a controlled environment, bots prevent anti-bot systems from detecting anomalies in behavior or environment.

How This Affects You:

Sandboxing allows bots to bypass sophisticated security checks that rely on executing code in a real user's browser. This means they can access areas of your application that are meant only for legitimate users.


The world of bot operators is filled with hidden keys and secret passages, but understanding these tactics is your best defense. Just as you would remove that spare key from under the doormat and secure hidden entrances to your home, it's crucial to identify and address these sophisticated intrusion methods in your applications. By learning how these unseen operators work, you can better decide what type of security vendor your application reality needs.

Arik Atar

Arik Atar

Arik Atar recently joined Radware's industry-leading Threat Research team, bringing his flavor of threat intelligence. While new to Radware, he draws on multifaceted expertise built across a 7-year career on the front lines of cyber threat hunting. In 2014, While completing his BA in International Relations and Counterterrorism at IDC University, Arik took his first steps on the darknet as part of his research on Iran-sponsored attack groups. On Bright Data, Arik uncovered both cyber adversaries'. He led investigations against high-profile proxy users that misused Bright Data's global residential proxy network to initiate mass-scale DDoS and bot attacks. In 2021, he moved from inspecting the attack logs from the attacker's view to inspecting the attack from the defender's point of view in human security (formal art PerimeterX), where he leveraged multiple hacker identities he developed over the years to hunt cyber threat intelligence on application hackers. Arik delivered keynote speeches at conferences such as Defcon, APIParis, and FraudFights' Cyber Defender meetups. Arik’s diverse career path has armed him with unique perspectives on application security. His expertise combines strategic cyber threat analysis with game theory and social psychology elements

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