How do Internet bots fill up forms randomly on websites? I am guessing they download the HTML source code and figure out the presence of forms. But then how exactly do they fill them up and actually submit the information?
I know many Forms use Captcha, but a number of systems also use techniques like detecting mouse movements, keyboard events to differentiate humans from bots. Can bots defeat them as well.
Basically, I want to know if there is any way a bot can track the Javascript changes in the code i.e the dynamic changes to the page ?
P.S: I am using this information for a grad project on techniques to defeat bots.
Some testing platforms like Watir actually perform mouse and keyboard actions instead of just HTTP requests (so any bot-prevention methods you do in Javascript could be avoided). This means it is basically impossible to differentiate between a bot and a human. Things like Captcha rely on bots being unable to correctly identify a word or words in an image, but even this can be broken some of the time with OCR.
Basically there are many measures you can put in place to discourage bots, but it’s pretty much impossible to stop them if they are diligent.