INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted daily life around the world and the WHO recently warned that an overabundance of information about
the virus makes it difficult for people to differentiate between legitimate news and misleading information.At the same time, EU security
services have warned that Russia is aggressively exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to push disinformation and weaken Western society
through its bot army.The cybersecurity firm Radware has been using its bot manager to monitor internet traffic in an attempt to track the
According to its data, bots have upped their game and organizations in the social media, ecommerce and digital publishing industries have
experienced a surge in bad bot traffic following the coronavirus outbreak.The bots have been found to be executing various insidious
activities including spreading disinformation, spam commenting and more
Radware also discovered that in February, 58.1 percent of bots had the capability to mimic human behavior
This means that they can disguise their identities, create fake accounts on social media sites and post their masters' propaganda while
appearing as a genuine user.Radware's research suggests that cybercriminals are targeting media and digital publishing sites in order to
scrape their unique content
This content is then published on malware-ridden websites to try and scam visitors looking for the latest news on the coronavirus.In fact,
27.7 percent of traffic on media sites in February was from bad bots carrying out automated activity, including scraping content
Ecommerce websites have also seen an increase in bot activity and during the same time period, 31.3 percent of their traffic was made up of
bad bots.In a blog post revealing its findings, senior content marketer for Radware's product marketing team, Manwendra Mishra explained how
infodemic much further, continuing to be an efficient tool for cybercriminals, nation-state actors, and conspiracy theorists alike
Because communication channels are diverse, authorities have very little control of bot activity
