Running a small business in 2025 involves navigating several challenging obstacles. Most of the time, these obstacles are in your control, and there are a number of strategies you can implement to avoid them being a problem.
One obstacle that will always remain, however, is the likelihood of a cyberattack. According to recent reports, the number of cyberattacks is on the rise, with nearly 50% of global businesses experiencing an attack of some kind within the last twelve months.
Of these attacks, the most common are ‘bot attacks’, where automated programs infiltrate systems to steal sensitive data, disrupt operations, or gain unauthorised access to company resources. But despite these cybersecurity concerns becoming more of an issue every year, the amount of companies that are not prepared for these types of attacks is staggering.
In the 2024 DataDome Global Security Report, for instance, it was discovered that advanced bots were detected less than 5% of the time, leaving 95% of businesses at risk of numerous advanced threats, including payment fraud, click fraud, and account takeover. If you’re running a small business, then, it’s crucial that you do everything in your power to protect yourself, and this starts with understanding what bot attacks you should be aware of.
With this in mind, we’ve listed out 3 of the most common bot attacks below, explaining why they’re so dangerous and what you can do to make sure you navigate them safely and efficiently.
The Power of Fake Chrome Bots
It’s true that cyberattackers have become far more advanced over the last decade, but that doesn’t mean you should stop worrying about the most basic attack methods. For instance, in the same report mentioned earlier, it was discovered that some of the most successful bot attacks came from fake Chrome bots. For those unaware, these are bots that use the same headers as real Chrome browsers to make requests via residential proxies.
Last year, only 15.82% of fake Chrome bots were detected by cybersecurity systems, leaving businesses at risk of everything from account takeover fraud to layer 7 DDoS attacks. In order to protect yourself efficiently from these types of bots, it’s crucial to utilise solutions that offer protection across various digital touchpoints, including websites, mobile apps, and APIs, ensuring a full defence against these types of automated threats.
Deadly DDoS Attacks
Another form of bot attack that you should know about is DDoS attacks, which stands for ‘Distributed Denial of Service’. In this instance, attackers use botnets – a network of compromised devices – to flood your server or website with traffic, overwhelming its capacity and causing it to crash. This is dangerous for several key reasons. For starters, it causes prolonged downtime, leading to financial losses and customer dissatisfaction. And secondly, DDoS attacks are often used to mask other malicious activities, including data theft and unauthorised system infiltration.
In other words, while your IT team is preoccupied with mitigating the flood of traffic, attackers will exploit vulnerabilities in the business software and exfiltrate sensitive data, making this a multifaceted threat that is incredibly hard to deal with if you don’t know what you’re looking for. A good way to fight this is with real-time mitigation. By analysing traffic in real-time, it’s possible to quickly detect and neutralise malicious activities, maintaining the integrity and availability of your digital services, and cutting off any DDoS attacks before they become an issue.
The Danger of Payment Fraud Bots
One last form of bot attack that has been particularly damaging for businesses in 2025 is payment fraud bots’, where bots use stolen credit card details to test multiple card numbers and make unauthorised purchases. This is a problem for obvious reasons: not only will businesses face chargebacks, transaction fees, and penalties from payment processors, but the customers affected will lose trust in your system, breaking their loyalty and putting all the money you used for attaining them to waste.
Sophisticated attacks like this can be a serious issue for businesses, but through AI-powered detection, it’s possible to process over 5 trillion signals daily, utilising artificial intelligence to identify and block attacks like this without compromising performance. Essentially, through the use of AI, companies are now able to analyse vast amounts of data for patterns indicative of fraudulent behaviour. By analysing this, ML algorithms can then monitor transactions and understand exactly what is unusual or likely to cause harm, automatically blocking transactions or flagging them for further review.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the most serious bot attacks to be aware of, but there are many more. Whether it’s ATO, web scraping, credential stuffing, scalping, or click fraud, you need to put all the necessary protections in place to make sure your company is never caught out. The solution is out there, you just need to know what you’re fighting against first.