“That is how I found out the bots were constantly trying to sign in,” he said. “I get four notifications a day saying somebody tried to sign in to your website.”
That situation is actually quite common, said Craig Petronella, president of Petronella Technology Group in Raleigh.
There are black market programs that search for open ports or doors in a network of Internet Protocol addresses, Petronella said.
When an open port is found, it will run other tools and analysis to figure out what versions of software they are using and search for related vulnerabilities, such as plug-ins that were updated.
“A bot is basically a computer program that is set to run at a certain level of frequency, and it keeps digging on it all day long,” he said.