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Barracuda Web Application Firewall

Bot Categories

  • Last updated on

The following table provides information about the bot categories:

Bot CategorySub-categoriesDescription
Crawler/Indexer
  • Search Engine Bot*
  • Copyright Bot
  • Aggregator
A web crawler is a robot, also called a spider, that visits your website looking for updates and new information, and uses it for their own purposes, such as a search engine. Examples include Google Bot, Apple Bot.
Tool (Developer Tool)
  • Website Analyzer Tool*
  • Proxy Service
  • Screenshot Creator*
  • Page Speed Tester*
  • Virus Scanner*
  • Backlink Checker*
  • Virtual Assistant
All tools that can be programmed for any purpose, malicious or not. For example, scripts or command line tools such as Wget and lwp-request, or programming language libraries that enable web requests such as Java or Python urllib.
Technical Partners/ Commercial Tools
  • Site Monitoring*
  • Marketing/Advertising*
  • SEO/Website Analyzer Tool
  • Chatbot
  • Vulnerability Scanner*
Tools or services that send requests to a website for a positive purpose, usually by the site owner or host, such as health checkers, broken link checkers, performance measurement tools, and payment service providers. For example: Rackspace Monitoring Agent, Amazon Route 53 Health Checks.
Social Media Agent
  • Link Preview Generator
  • Feed Fetcher*
A client that fetches feeds, such as RSS feeds, or uses an API. Indexing website for internal search engines. Supplies visual support when a link is shared. For example: Yahoo Pipes, Facebook External Hit.
Known Violator
  • Empty UA
  • Known Bad User Agent
  • Developer/Hacking Tool
  • HTTP Request Library
  • Application/Software Library
  • Known Bad Device
Known bad bots that are used to carry out attacks on websites.
Browser Integity
  • Improper Header Name/Value Pair
  • Non-Standard User Agent Build
Bots not sending proper header key value pair, or sending random user-agent strings to avoid detection.
Advanced Bots
  • Programmatic Browsing*
  • Automated Browser/Web driver
  • Headless Browser
Bots using the popular User-Agent Browser Automation tools, headless browsers, or web drivers. These bots are capable of executing JavaScript.
Impersonator
  • Impersonator
Bots trying to mimic behavior of good bots, such as Google Bot and Bing Bot, to avoid detection.
Advanced Persistent Bots
  • Advanced Persistent Bots

Bots that rotate IP address and user-agent headers to avoid detection.

Uncategorized
  • Unclassified
The Advanced Threat Intelligence engine cannot map the attack to one of the existing bot categories.
OR
The system is not sure if the attack is being made by a bot or a human.

Therefore, the engine marks the category as Uncategorized and the sub-category as Unclassified.

* Default bot categories. Bot categories without the * are powered by Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence. The advanced intelligence engine is ONLY available with the Advanced Bot Protection license.

Bot categories powered by the Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence engine/ABP are detected ONLY when:
- Enable Client Profile Validation for the security policy is set to Yes on the SECURITY POLICIES > Client Profile page.
- Bot categories are selected on the BOT MITIGATION > Bot Mitigation page, Web Scraping Policies section.