How to Block Bad Bots and Spammers in Magento

If you run an eCommerce store on Magento, then protecting your website from bad bots should be one of the key priorities.

Nowadays, online businesses are often facing the risk of getting attacked. Every business, irrespective of the eCommerce platform, is an easy target for spammers, hackers, and bots. That’s why all online store owners try to add as much security to the store as possible.

According to our recent research, 70% of an eCommerce website traffic is compromised by bots. This non-human traffic even goes over 80% during the sale season.

What are the risks of bad bots activity for your Magento store?

• User Data Theft – Fraudsters make use of bots for unauthorized purchases using stolen user credentials.
• Price Scraping – Price scraping is done by competitors to extract product pricing to undercut your dynamic pricing.
• Carding Fraud – Hackers run thousands of small purchases using stolen credit cards and then resell these cards at a much higher price.
• Web Scraping – Your competitors may employ bots to scrape your unique content and refurbish it elsewhere.
• Form Spam – Form spam is usually accomplished by bots, repeated submission of forms on a Magento website to spam the site with fake leads.
• Fake Account Creation – Fraudsters make use of bots to create fake accounts to commit various types of frauds such as content spam, spreading malware, skewing website SEO, etc.

Now, let’s focus on the last two mentioned above.

Spambots, as well as fake users, can cause extensive damage to your web store.  First and foremost, they make it difficult for you to identify your actual users which can lead to a long-term impact on your vision of the project.

The easiest way spammers enter your website is through fake registration. And, the identification of the bots is the first step in protection. Finding bad bots can be automated by using different custom solutions – it’s up to you to choose.

How to identify Magento bots manually?

1. On the Magento Admin sidebar, go to Customers to check out some unusual stuff (e.g. whether customers from other countries (.ru or .cn) pushing bad content to your site, even if they have valid emails);
2. Similarly, on the Admin  sidebar, go to Marketing > Reviews to check the unrelated content possibly attacking your website;
3. And, finally, on the Admin sidebar, go to Marketing > Newsletters to check the requests to newsletters area and the suspicious leads.

These issues would be elaborated further in this video ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Our Top Choice Free Magento Security Scanners:

• MageReport by Dutch provider Byte

  Usually, we use MageReport.com – free tool for a quick check of the security status of your Magento shop(s). It checks your Magento shop for all known vulnerabilities in Magento and even some commonly used 3rd party extensions.

• Website Scanner by Astra Security

  You can also scan your Magento store for the general security issues, SEO spam, blacklisting and so on with one another free website scanner – GetAstra.com

If you need a hand maintaining and optimising your website, please contact us to start discussing your requirements. For all those who want a free video review of Magento website – don’t hesitate and click the button right now.

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