Bot... What are you talking about?

We continue in our blog with the section: What are you talking about? It is a small contribution to this blog dedicated to Culture and in which we want to collect all those terms or expressions, whether or not they are included in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), but which for one reason or another, now or in recent years are "sounding" in the media, in the street, in our environment.

Today we present a term that we have been hearing for some time now, but that continues to scare and even irritate us, but it doesn't always have to. It is BOT. According to the RAE, "the word bot - a shortening by apheresis of the Spanish word robot -is used in reference to a computer programme that automatically performs certain tasks". The use of this term, according to the RAE, is fully valid and is already widespread in Spanish.

BOTBots usually operate through a network. The Internet is mainly made up of two types of traffic, that generated by real people and that generated by automated systems, which would be the case of bots. INCIBE, the National Institute of Cybersecurity, warns that botscan have a multitude of objectives and do not always have to be malicious, such as automating publications on a website or simulating conversations with humans. However, there are also malicious botswhose main functions are to distribute spam or malware, try to breach web forms or fill databases and, of course, carry out denial of service attacks.