Malicious bots can steal data, impact user experiences, and wreak financial havoc for digital businesses. Effective bot management prevents unauthorized access to web applications and helps keep revenue, customer loyalty, and reputation safe.
Legacy bot management solutions rely on blacklists to identify and block bad bots, which limits the effectiveness of protecting web applications and API endpoints. Instead, modern solutions use three approaches: challenge-based, behavioral, and machine-learning models to detect and stop automated threats.
Reduce Costs
The hardware, software, and network connectivity required to run websites and web-based applications are costly. Malicious bots can eat up bandwidth and consume server resources, which leads to higher infrastructure costs.
Moreover, a successful data breach can cost businesses hefty fines and damage brand reputation. Bot management can help reduce the impact of these costs by preventing fraud and cyberattacks.
Detecting and blocking bad bots without hurting legitimate users and customers is challenging for security teams. Traditional protection algorithms tend to be lax, allowing bad bots to attack websites, steal sales, and harm performance. On the other hand, overly rigorous protection systems may be at risk of false positives, blocking real users and good bots.
The right Bot Management solution provides a balanced approach that detects and blocks bad bots in real time while adding good ones to an allowed list. It also helps to identify and protect against attacks like credential stuffing and content scraping.
When bad bots access business applications and APIs, they can steal personal information for phishing campaigns, account takeover, and other forms of fraud. Verizon’s Bot Management can help prevent these automated attacks by assessing the integrity of an application in real-time and identifying malicious requests. It can block or redirect the request and flag it for further investigation.
Increase Conversions
Whether good or bad, bots impact digital business operations in various ways. They can create a heavy load on web servers that slows down websites and apps and even deny access to legitimate users. They can also scrape content spam pages, download files and data, steal user credentials, and carry out denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
A comprehensive bot management solution monitors incoming traffic. It can identify both good and bad bots, adding the former to a list of allowed bots and blocking the latter via various mechanisms such as rate limiting and detecting behavioral patterns. This can prevent many cyberattacks caused by bots, including SQL injection risks, automated vulnerability scanners, phishing campaigns, and other malicious online activity.
The technology behind a good bot manager can see the traffic at the edge of your network, where it first connects to your website or app and uses clean data on the type of traffic, its volume, and its patterns to distinguish between human users and bad bots in real-time. It can use a combination of techniques, such as challenge-based approaches, such as JavaScript challenges and CAPTCHA verification, as well as passive fingerprinting and device fingerprinting.
In addition to reducing costs and improving user experience, effective Bot Management can increase customer satisfaction by eliminating the frustration of fraudulent activities. Malicious bots that slow down sites and take over accounts tarnish the brand image, while click fraud drains advertising budgets without producing revenue. The bottom line is that digital businesses must refrain from absorbing these losses as a cost of doing business.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Businesses rely on online channels to sell products and services and interact with customers. However, if your website or app gets infiltrated by malicious bots, it can damage customer experience and hurt your reputation. This is why it’s essential to implement a comprehensive bot management solution that prevents terrible traffic.
Bot management solutions detect and block undesired or malicious bot traffic while allowing useful ones to access web apps and properties. They use a range of mechanisms, including blocking lists and rate limiting, to prevent a wide variety of automated attacks. Malicious bots engage in harmful activities, including content scraping, click fraud, and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These can result in financial losses, compromised user data, and a tarnished online reputation for the affected business or website.
A good bot management solution should be able to identify and categorize both benign and malicious traffic in real-time. This is essential because protection algorithms may allow malicious bots to attack websites and steal information if they are too lax. On the other hand, if they’re too rigorous, they might accidentally block legitimate bots and even real users or customers. Kasada’s bot management solution is designed to distinguish between these two groups, and its telemetry-based detection systems can recognize retooled attacks that malicious actors often use.
Reduce Risk
Malicious bots are a significant security threat to websites, applications, and online services. These bots perform malicious activities such as click fraud, credential stuffing, content scraping, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attack types cost businesses financial losses, tarnish their reputations, and compromise user data.
Effective bot management prevents damaging performance and security impacts by detecting and mitigating bot traffic. It does this by separating legitimate human traffic from unwanted and harmful bots using advanced technology such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analysis.
The best bot management solutions are reliable, accurate, and flexible. Dedicated means that they can correctly identify humans and good bots with meager error rates – no more than 1-2% of human visitors should ever be misidentified as bad bots. Accurate means that they detect and block bad bots accurately while letting good bots through easily and quickly. Flexibility refers to the ability for customers to define what subset of their traffic Bot Management mitigations are applied to, e.g., just login URLs, pricing pages, or sitewide.
A robust bot management solution identifies and mitigates all automated threats at the edge before they reach web servers and cause damage. This makes it more effective than on-premise and on-page protection, which only detect and block bots after getting a website or application.