A Botnet consists of many bots (short for robots) that contain code to execute repetitive tasks with high frequency. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its connection.

With the rise in the use of cloud services and the low cost of services it is now relatively easy to deploy thousands of bots quickly. This has led to a dramatic rise in the use of bots globally. Unfortunately, cyber criminals have also leveraged this technology for nefarious purposes. Botnets are commonly used for click fraud to artificially rise the cost of web advertising for organizations, credential abuse targeting user logins and scrapers to get a competitive advantage to name just a few.