The following table provides information about the bot categories:
| Bot Category | Sub-categories | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler/Indexer |
| 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) |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Known bad bots that are used to carry out attacks on websites. |
| Browser Integity |
| Bots not sending proper header key value pair, or sending random user-agent strings to avoid detection. |
| Advanced Bots |
| Bots using the popular User-Agent Browser Automation tools, headless browsers, or web drivers. These bots are capable of executing JavaScript. |
| Impersonator |
| Bots trying to mimic behavior of good bots, such as Google Bot and Bing Bot, to avoid detection. |
| Advanced Persistent Bots |
| Bots that rotate IP address and user-agent headers to avoid detection. |
| Uncategorized |
| 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. |