Might I disagree.
They are vandals.
A parasite is an organism that survives by extracting from others. These are bots or bots designed by mindless individuals and set loose to do harm. They deserve even less respect than computer viruses that at least mimic proto-lifeforms. There is no "it" to have a survival agenda here.
Having done with "Harms", as I research the "Motives" chapter of Ethics for Hackers I've taken an unexpected dive into criminology and now see a blind-spot in the entrepreneurial, late-capitalist mind-set of the "Silicon Valley" hacker space. There's a tendency to see everything through a rather narrow lens of financial motives. Not everything is about making a buck (although much is - at the end of the day).
So for example, some motives out there are purely destructive. Or at least they are so lowbrow and random in their consideration as to be indistinguishable from entirely senseless acts.
We look at them and say "What's the business angle here?". Sometimes there really isn't one. And it's not ideological either, like championing free-speech, democracy, communism or whatever. Nor discordian, nihilistic and chaotic.
Boredom, resentment, disrespct, low cost and consequences and "just because you can" are on the up because of "AI" and automation. I think we presume certain motives declined after the early years of trophy-hacking and ego hacks gave way to structured cybercrime in the 90s. But machine learning and "at scale" thinking is unleashing a different breed of senselessness. Poisoning of public data spaces by ostensible "advertising", whether as email spam, highly adaptive link-farms, GPT generated bait-copy and whatnot is a new quality of threat. Search engines don't seem able to manage it, so the "internet" (what is left of the Web) is starting to resemble a derelict neighbourhood with smashed windows, upturned trash cans and graffiti everywhere as bored and desperate gangs roam.
