{"id":45572,"date":"2021-07-30T13:12:53","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T06:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/act.com\/how-to-protect-your-marketing-campaigns-from-bots-and-list-bombing\/"},"modified":"2023-03-21T10:49:45","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T17:49:45","slug":"how-to-protect-your-marketing-campaigns-from-bots-and-list-bombing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/products.act.com\/en-gb\/how-to-protect-your-marketing-campaigns-from-bots-and-list-bombing\/","title":{"rendered":"How to protect your marketing campaigns from bots and list bombing"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
\r\n
\"Best<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Imagine this scenario: an attacker uses an automated program, or bot, to fill out your email marketing subscription form with another person\u2019s email address (or thousands of times with different addresses), and your automated marketing campaign sends email to recipients that didn\u2019t actually subscribe. That\u2019s not great for you, but imagine what happens to the email recipients if the bot does this to tens of thousands of email marketing forms: the recipients\u2019 inboxes are suddenly flooded with marketing email from legitimate businesses, and not typical spam that might get blocked or go to junk. Their inbox is now useless until the barrage of email subsides.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

So an attacker has ruined someone\u2019s inbox for a few weeks (or more likely, forever) – what\u2019s the point? List bombing is at minimum an effective distraction and usually part of something bigger: the real goal is to hamper an individual\u2019s ability to deal with another crisis, such as a government official or an IT security professional fending off an active attack on their system, or really anyone just trying to do their job.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How list bombing can affect you<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Even if you aren\u2019t the target of the attack, if your marketing automation is hijacked and used as a tool to perform the attack, you\u2019ll receive collateral damage. In addition to being implicated as part of the specific attack, sending email to recipients that didn\u2019t actually subscribe will generate spam complaints, hard bounces, and spam trap hits (depending on what email addresses the bot submits to your form) which hurts your sender reputation<\/a>, email deliverability, and in turn, your bottom line. Recipient email networks won\u2019t offer forgiveness just because you didn\u2019t orchestrate the attack, and they\u2019ll still hold you accountable because you didn\u2019t take steps to prevent your marketing automation from being hijacked. The other major impact is database pollution: Having thousands of bogus addresses in your database with no easy way to identify them is not a problem you want to deal with.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

How to protect your marketing automation<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

To prevent your marketing automation from becoming a tool for list bombing, you\u2019ll need to employ the following tactics in tandem:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n