How to add Bot Management to Web Security Measures?

Bots are a glaring reality of the present times and account for 40% of internet traffic. There is a wide range of bot operators – from individuals to legitimate businesses as well as criminal outfits, creating bots for a variety of tasks. With the benefit of automation, operators implement bots for highly repetitive tasks, from search engine indexing, website monitoring to DDoS attacks and other cyber threats. This shows that bots are here to stay, and any organization doing business online should have a proper BOT detection and mitigation strategy that allows you to sift out the bad bots from the good ones. Read on to understand the what’s, why’s, and how’s of BOT management solutions.

Why BOT Management?

Bot management is critical to every business to enhance performance and safeguard it from malicious bots as they can overload servers. This, in turn, slows down or denies legitimate users from accessing the web portal. Some of the bad bots steal content, credentials, and proprietary assets too. These can be later used for spam content, phish users, and have cyber attacks. Thus, a BOT management solution should be combined with other web security measures like installing a firewall, access management solutions, and multi-factor authentication to detect and avoid cyber attacks and other online threats.

What does a BOT Management Solution do?

A bot management manages the bots. It blocks the bad bots and allows the good ones through instead of simply blocking all the non-human traffic. The main works of a bot mitigation solution are:

Identify bots from human visitors
Identify bot origin, including IP addresses, and block some based on IP reputation
Check bot reputation
Analyze bot behavior and allow good bots to enter
Give a CAPTCHA test, JavaScript injection to challenge bots from time to time
Stop access to some content or resources for bad bots
Rate limit any bot over-using a service within a specific time period

How to add Bot Management in Web Security Measures?

Malicious bots can harm a website’s performance, steal sales, and spoil the customer experience. Thus, a proper bot management and mitigation solution is a must to avoid cyber attacks, which are ever-prevalent in today’s times. It is pertinent to mitigate bot threats in the bud and safeguard your website and business in the long run. Here are the successful bot management steps.

1. Categorize Bots

Categorize bots as per popular and well-publicized bots that interact with online businesses, individual bots specific to an organization (both good and bad), and the unknown bots. Once this categorization is complete IT teams can create specific policies to manage the various activities of the bots as per their impact and the performance of the web infrastructure.

2. User Behavior-Based Bot Detection

Bots can mimic human behavior. Low and slow attacks that cannot be detected easily have become more prevalent. Also, bots are distributed massively on residential and IoT IP addresses, making IP-based security systems irrelevant to fight malicious bot traffic. This shows that you cannot apply a one-fit-for-all solution. In today’s scenario, real-time behavioral analysis of blocking and detecting bad bots is the best solution.

You can identify new threats from bots through statistical and behavioral detection taking data from SDK inputs, session tracking, server-side fingerprints, and a JS rendering engine.

3. Have a combination of server-side and client-side bot detection

It is essential to have a mix of client-side and server-side bot detection. The server-side module collects fingerprints and HTTP requests and analyzes each request in real-time through an AI detection engine and blocks the bots. However, this is not enough as the advanced bots use the same browsers as humans, including Chrome Safari, and can forge fingerprints. Thus, having a server-side detection will miss these bots.

You should have a combination of server-side fingerprinting with client-side signals records and analyze a variety of browsers, device features, and apps along with behavioral signals like touch movements. These help to detect the most advanced bots.

4. Cloud-based Bot Mitigation

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks bombard websites with traffic delivered via botnets that are usually created by networked endpoints joined by malware. Having cloud-based DDoS mitigation software solutions defend against these attacks through proper monitoring of web traffic and having baselines for regular traffic loads. These solutions are in the form of software as a service (SaaS) and protect the organization regardless of its size.

Conclusion

The volume of non-human bot traffic to websites is increasing, and businesses are using more resources to serve these automated clients whose behavior could upset the website performance and also spoil customer experience. To have firm control over this non-human traffic (bots), IT teams should have robust bot management and mitigation solutions in place. Only blocking bots is not the best or only way to deal with them. Instead, having a proactive bot management approach is the way forward.