Bots are used as a way for humans to automate tasks that are often repetitive and time-consuming. Though bots can be used without causing harm, they can also earn the blame for wreaking havoc on a company’s analytics and security. Companies must therefore be vigilant and ready to mitigate any risks that come with bots. Here’s how.
The first step in detecting and protecting against bots is to understand how they work.
Bots are smart and can be utilized to automate tasks to improve a user’s interaction with your site. For instance, some companies use bots for automated QA or active monitoring. Unfortunately, that same technology can also be used to inflict harm. It is therefore necessary for companies to be able to differentiate between good bots and bad bots, which can be tricky.
As mentioned, not all bot traffic is harmful or illegitimate. Bots can help perform a lot of tasks that enable companies to become more efficient and productive. Some beneficial bot capabilities are as follows:
Search engine/social media crawlers.
Automation of tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, for example, browser extensions that automatically insert coupon codes when a user checks out at a site.
Proprietary integrations with partners (e.g., aggregators and online travel agencies, such as when bots scrape prices, making for quick searches).
Thus, while you want to detect and prevent bad bots, you want to make sure you are not targeting good bots at the same time.
In general, the most basic bad bot attacks drive traffic to a website that is not actually coming from real users. This can take a negative toll not just on your analytics but on your overall security and the trustworthiness of your site for customers. Some examples of negative bot traffic include:
Spamming your company by filling out contact forms with fake information.
Making it look like your website has more users than it actually has.
Tricking you into thinking you have leads when you don’t.
Engaging with competitors on social media.
Posting automated negative comments or reviews.
The worst bots, though, can fully automate attacks on your network if they are not detected early enough. These attacks can include:
Breaking into users’ accounts to make false transactions and/or steal data.
Overload servers to shut down a network completely, which can be detrimental to a company’s reputation and finances.
Bots are becoming more sophisticated as artificial intelligence develops. For example, bots have created content to push very real political agendas on social media and digital spaces, with real-world impacts.
The good news is that the intelligence to keep up with bad bots is also becoming more sophisticated. With bots becoming easier to detect and prevent, they may not pose as much of a serious risk as other security concerns.
As mentioned, bots can be detected by manually recognizing patterns such as:
Unusually high page views.
Unfamiliar referral traffic.
Traffic coming from places and/or devices that wouldn’t normally be interacting with your site.
Clunky punctuation and grammar.
But as companies scale, manual detection becomes impossible. Companies therefore need more effective ways to have an up-to-date bot detection solution.
A bot detection solution should be able to deal with the entire spectrum of bot activity, and it should involve several detection techniques, including:
Device and network attribute anomalies (e.g., user-agent, referrals).
Usage velocities (e.g., abnormal traffic volumes from specific IP addresses).
Behavioral anomalies (e.g. non-human keyboard/mouse interactions).
So, your bot detection solution has helped you detect bots. The next step is preventing them from causing damage.
To start, when moving from "detection" to "prevention", a very important requirement is added: detection in real time. Essentially, companies need to be able to detect bot traffic as early as possible and prevent bots from causing the damage they intend to cause.
Before you do this, it is important to recognize that prevention also means that your company will need to consider the user experience. Detection accuracy needs to be sophisticated enough that it won’t take away from the frictionless user experience that legitimate users expect. Only bad bots need to be stopped; if legitimate users are being confused with bots, you’ll have more problems on your hands.
The good news is that there are several high-level bot prevention techniques:
Blocking traffic that you’re sure has originated from bots is a very effective method. However, this should only be used when there is very high certainty that you’re indeed facing a bot. Remember; if you assume everyone is a bot, you might be preventing legitimate users from accessing the network.
Generally, specific solutions geared towards bot management typically feature the ability to actually block bot traffic. However, these solutions may not be great at combating other types of fraud and could put a strain on resources. Instead, look for solutions that can be integrated to maximize your overall fraud-block potential. For instance, PingOne Fraud offers bot detection and can be integrated with PingOne Authorize to achieve this bot-block use case.
A second method to prevent bots is to add a challenge in the form of a CAPTCHA, which is one of the most common methods. Most users have probably come across a CAPTCHA before. CAPTCHAs—if done right—are great at creating the appropriate amount of friction for users by requiring them to easily overcome a challenge that would otherwise be very difficult for a bot. Examples are a grid popping up with different images that you have to identify.
Of course, it is true that sophisticated bots can bypass a CAPTCHA relatively easily by simulating/mocking human mouse interactions. And, there are free code libraries out there and tutorials on how to do it.
That being said, using CAPTCHAs is a very accessible solution that works in some bot detection. And, while it’s not the most beloved method amongst users, again, most of us are used to it.
Finally, a third bot prevention method is to incorporate an MFA solution for your organization and your customers. Forcing MFA can be used for cases where you suspect a bot is trying to log in to accounts, especially bots that utilize credential stuffing to steal account information and use it to try and gain access. MFA not only helps drastically mitigate this but also won’t cause friction for legitimate users. MFA helps you to ensure your users are who they say they are while keeping bots at bay.
Though the methods above work well to prevent bots, there is another method to help teams prevent bots: getting into the mind of the attacker.
Bots are sophisticated, but only as sophisticated as the people behind them. So, why would an attacker want to use a bot to get through your network? Begin by thinking about the attacker’s motives.
Next, think about the technologies they would use to carry out the bot attack, which often matches the motive (but not always).
Generally, bot traffic may be mostly attempted account takeovers through brute force attacks to guess a password. Alternatively, bots may create lots of new accounts to commit new account fraud at scale. Generally, by looking at session characteristics, identity professionals can determine whether or not a user is human. To do this, they can look at the specific technologies attackers might use and then the implications of those technologies.
There are many technologies that can be used to implement bots, from very basic technologies that just mimic the HTTP traffic of a legitimate client (web browser/mobile application) to more sophisticated technologies that actually control a legitimate client.
A good rule of thumb is that simpler bots/technologies are easier and cheaper to scale because they demand fewer resources. This means they may be easier to detect and prevent. Likewise, the more advanced bots are, the more niche the intended attack is meant to be, and thus, the harder they may be to detect and prevent.
So, which technology would your attackers be using, and why?
Detecting and preventing bots is important to protecting your network, but when doing so, it’s necessary to keep your users satisfied with their digital experience. Keeping bots out and users in can be a difficult task to balance, but the right bot detection solution goes a long way.
If your organization needs some help in detecting bots, check out how to prevent online fraud.
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