Over the last two decades, bots have become an integral part of the Internet and account for about 40% of internet traffic. These sophisticated software programs are used to do most of the automated tasks over the Internet. A large percentage of Internet traffic is bots scanning content, interacting with users, and looking for attack targets. Some bots are useful, while others can have malicious intent. They are programmed to hack into user accounts, scan the internet for personal information to send spam and other harmful activities. Over the years, bot sophistication has improved, making them more complex and dangerous than useful. Hence, the emergence of advanced bot protection.
An increasing number of businesses are looking at ways to distinguish good bots from the bad to allow good bot activity to flourish in their business and stop malicious ones from extensive damage. Let’s find out all about bot management and how to protect the website from bots.
How does Advanced Bot Protection work?
Bad bots are waiting in cyberspace to infect your system and extract all valuable inputs. In fact, in the year 2020 with COVID – 19 enforcing most of the workforce to be home, there has been a substantial increase in internet traffic, and the impact of bad bots thereof is also on the rise. There has been an increasing number of credential stuffing attacks with bot operators using bad bots to have unauthorized access to accounts. In such a scenario, there is an even more urgent need to have advanced bot protection.
Advanced bot protection uses an accurate understanding of your application’s risk, application context, and continuous updates to Bot mitigation rules taking these into account to prevent bots.
Usually, an advanced bot protection solution secures the access points of the website or the mobile application/API and analyzes to identify if it is a bot request. It categorizes if the traffic is coming from a human, good bot, or bad bot. Thereafter, it collects and analyzes the bot traffic and finds anomalies in them. Various models identify real-time bot behavior through the entire network and put it through their own violator’s database too. They give browser validation and sophisticated detection of malicious botnets that are lurking behind shared IP space. For enhanced bad bot protection, the software rates the limits based on device fingerprints and is not restricted only to IPs.
Advanced Bot Mitigation Techniques
Bots have evolved and so have the mitigation techniques to thwart them. There are three technical ways to mitigate and detect bad bots-
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 is used for future behavioral application context-based detection.
Benefits of Advanced Bot Protection
Here are some of the reasons why bot protection has become a must-have for businesses.
- Better business returns
The removal of malicious bots from your website, APIs, or mobile application results in enhanced business metrics. For instance, an increase in e-commerce conversions, no accounting fraud, and more. This, in turn, reduces the associated infrastructure costs linked to serving traffic to bad bots.
- Enhances Key Performance Indicators(KPIs)
Businesses investing in detection methods to recognize bad bots are seeing improvements in KPIs as it ensures the backend application does not have to deal with noise and its processing is restricted only to good traffic.
- Improved page loading speed
Customers see a marked difference in the page loading speed after deploying advanced bot protection. This, in turn, results in a fast content delivery network, which enhances overall performance.
- Optimize Business Intelligence
It helps in eliminating unwanted bot traffic that can affect the legitimate Business Intelligence (BI) data. With advanced bot protection, you can focus more on real customer engagement.
Conclusion
Effective bot management solutions can stop malicious bot activity and allow constructive bot activity to fulfill routine tasks through machine learning. These tools nip any malicious behavior in the bud without blocking good bots and affecting the user experience. Use these robust bot mitigation point solutions to your advantage and safeguard your business or website from any kind of threat.
