What is a Bot/Botnet?

A botnet (combination of 'robot' and 'network') is a collection of internet-connected devices, such as PCs, servers, mobile devices and IoT devices that are controlled as a group.

A botnet (combination of 'robot' and 'network') is a collection of internet-connected devices, such as PCs, servers, mobile devices and IoT devices that are controlled as a group (an orchestrated confederation of bots). Bots can be good and bad. Good ones perform jobs like search engine crawling, monitoring website health and website vulnerability scanning. Bad ones perform website scraping, DDoS attacks and comment spam.

An increasingly common hacking technique is to take control of the devices of multiple users and combine those bots into a more powerful botnet to launch to further advance malicious campaigns to breach targeted resources.