As bots proliferate, sorting between them and human traffic has become more difficult. Additionally, companies now need to differentiate between good and bad bots to ensure that their security solutions are not blocking helpful or benign bots. This is too much for any one security team to handle given the sheer number of potential threats, but bot protection solutions are available. Finding the right solution can make the difference between your organization’s success and failure in a highly complex, challenging threat environment.
The Good and the Bad
Like any tool, the value of a bot lies in how it is used. A bot isn’t fundamentally bad, but in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc on your applications and compromise your organization. Good bots can be helpful for monitoring your environment, tracking customers and application traffic, and automating some of your IT team’s tasks. They perform valuable and essential functions. However, bad bots are designed to infiltrate your security environment or commandeer your machines, and they are generally intended to either compromise your business, steal your data, or exploit your application’s vulnerabilities.
Although bad bots are not the majority (fortunately), you should be concerned by the high proportion of malicious traffic that could easily be directed at your application. More concerning is the proportion of bad bots that are evasive, which currently stands at around 3/4 of all bad bots. So, not only are bad bots everywhere, but also they are getting sneakier.
The Bot Threat Landscape
There’s almost no end to the possible bad bots that might come after your application, but here are some common threats to look out for:
- Data Scrapers. Some bots are used to go through your website or software and pull out as much information as possible. Generally, these bots originate from your competitors, and they are interested in your pricing information, proprietary content and internal data, and inventory.
- Scalpers. Speaking of inventory, scalper bots are looking for your products for purchase (immediately) so that it can be resold for a higher price. Some scalpers will buy out your entire inventory to then resell on their own platform. This is less of a problem if your organization only deals in digital products or services, but if you have a physical inventory, scalpers can cause issues with your legitimate customer base.
- DDoS Bots. In a DDoS attack, bots swarm your corner of the web, making it impossible for your servers to keep up with the sudden influx of traffic. The attackers can use the chaos for a variety of purposes, including stealing your data, blocking legitimate traffic, and account takeovers.
- Business Logic Attackers. In a business logic attack, the bots steal information and sneak into user accounts by using your software’s legitimate purposes and functionalities against it. These are much trickier to combat than other attacks because they are legitimate requests with nefarious purposes.
Bad bots are nothing to be trifled with. However, some are easier to spot than others. A simple bot with a single origin point will use automated scripts to attempt to breach your security, and these are a relatively straightforward threat to mitigate. More complex bad bots will simulate browser activity or user behavior, which can be much more challenging to detect. The most sophisticated and evasive bots can now solve CAPTCHA puzzles and successfully imitate human behavior.
The most threatening thing about an evasive bad bot is its ability to pass through your software undetected. Evasive bots take a low-profile, slow-acting approach. Rather than relying on massive numbers of requests or repeatedly attempting to guess a password, evasive bots imitate normal traffic patterns. They use lower numbers of requests than traditional bots, and they delay those requests to appear more human. As a result, attackers are finding more success with bot attacks, even when attempting to compromise organizations that are monitoring traffic for bot activity.
Managing the Bot Threat
The challenge for your organization is to protect it from bad bots without making interacting with your software or website overly cumbersome for your legitimate human traffic. Although good bots can have their disadvantages, you also want to avoid blocking them. This is especially important for protecting your APIs, which are at higher risk of successful bot infiltration due to business logic attacks.
To manage the bot threats, it’s best to implement highly sophisticated advanced bot protection that can detect bad bots and block them. Look for bot protection that specializes in protecting against OWASP automated threats, including scraping, scalping, and credential stuffing. Check to be sure that the solution you choose can handle business logic attacks. The best bot protection will be highly precise, proactive, adaptable, and comprehensive. It needs to cover APIs, applications, and websites to effectively mitigate the bot threat.
Finding the right bot management solution is the best way to manage the bot threat to your organization. You need a highly specific tool to sort through good bots and bad bots, especially given that they compose a near-equal percentage of all web traffic when compared to humans. The threat can be overwhelming, but the automation and security provided by a bot detection and protection solution is your best chance at managing these threats and securing your data.
