This week’s podcast is sponsored by DataDome. In it, we speak with DataDome’s Benjamin Fabre about how bot activity has greatly increased as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and how inauthentic activity driven by bots is driving up operating costs for e-commerce companies of all shapes and sizes. We also talk about how bot prevention is complicated by the shift from web pages to mobile applications and APIs.

As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry. You can also listen to it on iTunes and Spotify. Or, check us out on Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Radio Public and more. Also: if you enjoy this podcast, consider signing up to receive it in your email. Just point your web browser to securityledger.com/subscribe to get notified whenever a new podcast is posted. 

Everyone, no matter their age or origin, can tell you what a “robot” is. A simple Google search will tell you that it’s a machine that resembles a human being, which also performs human-like functions and movements automatically. The word itself is actually derivative of the Czech word “robota,” meaning forced labor. It’s no wonder then that “bot,” which is an automated computer program that pretends to be human, is short for “robot.”

Benjamin Fabre is the President and co-founder at DataDome

Turing Tests To Chatbots

Robot programs, have been a staple of modern computing going back to British computer scientist Alan Turing’s famous Imitation Game – the “Turing Test” – which was designed to judge a machine’s ability to exhibit – or mimic – intelligent behavior well enough to fool a human observer. 

New Rapidly-Spreading Hide and Seek IoT Botnet Identified by Bitdefender

But in recent decades, as online commerce and activity have grown to account for a bigger and bigger share of the world’s economy, bots have taken on new prominence and importance. No longer the stuff of laboratory experiments in machine intelligence, bots these days perform a dizzying array of tasks: from indexing the contents of web pages, to assisting online shoppers to providing customer support. 

On the other side of the ledger, bot driven distributed denial of service attacks are a sou...