Chapter 6. Protection Against Bots

Search engines are one of the great inventions that helped the Internet grow and become what it is today. Any powerful tool can be (and usually is) a double-edged sword. With search engines we the common users, can find almost anything that is of our personal interest, but as a website owner and/or administrator we must know what amount of information is available to the general public. If that amount surpasses our intentional or allowed boundaries, then we must know how to detect such instances and remedy the situation. In this chapter we will focus on the following topics:

• Internet bots—types and dangers

• Protecting Moodle from undesired search bots

• Protection against spam bots

• Protection against brute force dictionary attacks

Internet bots

Internet bots are software applications that run automated tasks applied to any content publicly available on the Internet. Usually they perform tasks that are repetitive and trivial at a much higher speed than any human...