Advanced Bot Protection: What is it and why do you need it?
Bots are an integral part of the internet and account for over a quarter of all web-related traffic. They are sophisticated software programs that automate tasks over the internet and come in both good and bad forms.
Good bots can scan content, such as Googlebot, which is a web crawler software used by Google to build its searchable index. Good bots can also interact with users, such as chatbots, that take customers through auto-populated questions. This saves customer service representatives’ time (and company money) by collecting routine information like order numbers and common questions and/or complaints from users. Bots can also continuously scan for attack targets.
Bad bots, on the other hand, are malicious and enable high-speed attacks against individuals and companies. These attacks can range from web scraping and data mining from competitors, scanning content for personal information to utilize in spam or phishing attacks, and can even hack user accounts.
As technology advances and internet traffic continues to rise, so does the impact that these bad bots have. The sophistication and type of attack utilized can vary between verticals, as shown in Figures 1 and 2 below, but the effect is universal. Bad bots cost organizations time, money, and even brand trust and credibility.
Figure 1: Types of Bad Bots Targeting the E-Commerce Industry (Source: Radware.com)
Figure 2: Types of Bad Bots Targeting the Travel Industry (Source: Radware.com)
How Does Advanced Bot Protection Work?
Advanced bot protection continuously monitors internet traffic and safeguards websites, mobile apps, and API’s from fraudulent activity. There are a variety of bot detection and mitigation products available to fit your organization’s needs. This list of providers ranked by Gartner compares verified reviews that showcases specific product capabilities.
According to one provider, Imperva, their software “defends customers against web scraping, account takeover, scalping, transaction fraud, gift card fraud, denial of service, competitive data mining, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, click fraud, and web and mobile API abuse.”
An advanced bot protection solution can provide several metrics that monitor its performance, including: 1) traffic patterns over time, 2) site traffic by requests over time, 3) mitigation actions, 4) mitigation action breakdown, 5) managed conditions over time, and 6) custom tags over time.
Figure 3: Examples of Metrics Provided by an Advanced Bot Protection Solution (Source: Imperva)
These bot protection solutions secure access points by analyzing and categorizing traffic into 3 categories; human, good bot, and bad bot. By collecting and analyzing real-time bot traffic and behaviors, these software programs can pinpoint anomalies and detect malicious activity.
Advanced Bot Mitigation Techniques
There are three technical ways advanced bot protection software identifies and mitigates bad bot threats:
1. Behavioral and Application context-based Approach: In this technique, the software looks at the signature behavior of every visitor and sees if it is exactly what it claims to be. It makes a baseline of regular behavior and sees if the user differs from that. It also compares these behavior patterns with previously known bad bots and acts based on if it is suspicious (throw a captcha for additional validation) and block if it is guaranteed to be a bad bot.
2. Static Approach: The bot protection tools identify header information and web requests related to bad bots that determine the bot’s identity. If it finds any malicious behavior, it is immediately blocked.
3. Challenge-based Approach: It checks if the traffic is from humans or bots. These bot detectors can check the user’s ability to run JavaScript, use cookies, and handle CAPTCHA elements. If the user cannot process any of these elements, it is usually a bot and is blocked and the intelligence gained from the CAPTCHA challenge, including fingerprinting information used for future behavioral application context-based detection.
How Will Advanced Bot Protection Benefit Your Organization?
The most obvious question when looking into security options for your organization is how is advanced bot protection going to be beneficial? Here are three ways advanced bot protection can benefit your organization:
1. Improved Site Performance: The use of advanced bot protection improves your site’s page load speed by reducing the strain of bad bot traffic on your site allowing your customers to have a better experience. A better customer experience can lead to more engagement, loyalty, and even increased sales.
2. More Reliable Metrics: By reducing the “noise” of bad bots, your analytic data can more accurately represent legitimate customer engagement, which makes your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) more reliable, which improves Business Intelligence (BI) analysis.
3. Free Up IT: Utilizing advanced bot protection can also reduce the strain on an organization’s IT department, freeing up valuable time and assets.
Conclusion
Effective bot management solutions can stop malicious bot activity without blocking good bots and affecting the user experience. To keep pace with the ever-growing sophistication of cyberattacks, having advanced bot protection helps level the playing field against threat actors. It should be one part of a robust security architecture to protect, not only your organization’s interests, but your customer’s as well.
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