How to Detect & Prevent Bots on Your Website

 

Introduction

Bots are an opportunity for humans to perform tasks which are usually tedious and time-consuming. While bots can be employed in a safe manner however, they also carry the blame for creating chaos on an organization's security and analytics. Therefore, companies must be on guard and prepared to minimize the risks associated from bots. Here's how.

Understanding the Issue with Bots

The first step in identifying and defending against bots is understanding the way they operate.

Bots are clever and can be used to automate tasks in order to enhance the user's experience on your website. For instance, some businesses make use of bots for automated checking or active monitoring. However, the same technology could use to cause damage. It is thus essential for businesses to discern between good and bad bots, which is challenging.

What are Good Bots?

Like I said, not every bots are malicious or untrue. Bots are able to assist in many tasks that help companies improve efficiency and productivity. A few of the benefits bots can provide include:

·         Search engine/social media crawlers.

·         Automating tasks that would otherwise require a significant amount of time, like browser extensions that automatically add coupons every time a user goes to a website.

·         Partnerships that have proprietary integrations (e.g. the aggregators, aggregators and online travel agents for instance, the time when bots scrape prices, creating quick searches).

So, while you are trying to identify and stop bad bots, it is important to ensure you're not taking advantage of good bots at the same while.

What Are Bad Bots?

In generally, the most basic malicious bots drive users to a site that does not originate from actual users. It can cause a significant impact not only on your website's analytics, but also on your overall security as well as the credibility of your website for your customers. Examples of bots that are harmful to traffic are:

·         Sending out spam to your business through contact forms that contain fake information.

·         It is a way to make it appear as if your site has more visitors than it actually does.

·         They trick you into thinking that you're in the lead when you do not.

·         Engaging with competitors through social media.

·         Making automated negative or negative reviews.

The most malicious bots, however they can completely create attacks that are completely automated if not caught in time. This can mean:

·         Accessing accounts of users to perform fraudulent transactions or take information.

·         Overloaded servers can close down networks completely, which is negative for a company's image and financial health.

How to Detect Bad Bots on Your Site or Application

Bots are getting smarter as artificial intelligence advances. As an example bots have developed content that pushes extremely real-world political agendas on social media and in digital spaces that have real-world consequences.

The positive side is that the ability to keep up with malicious bots is also becoming sophisticated. As bots become easier to identify and avoid it is possible that they do not pose the same serious threat as other security issues.

As stated that bots can be identified by recognizing patterns manually like:

·         Rarely, large page view.

·         Unfamiliar referral traffic.

·         Visitors coming from locations and/or devices that aren't typically engaging with your website.

·         Grammatical and punctuation errors that are a mess.

However, as businesses grow and expand, manual detection becomes ineffective. Businesses therefore require more efficient methods to keep up-to-date with their bot detection software.

Bot detection tool is required to tackle the entire range of bot activities and must employ various detection methods, such as:

·         Network and device attribute anomalies (e.g. user-agent and referrals).

·         Velocity of usage (e.g. traffic volume from particular IP addresses).

·         Anomalies in behavior (e.g. non-human keyboard/mouse interactions).

How to Prevent Bot Traffic

So, your bot detection solution has helped you detect bots. It is now time to stopping them from doing damage.

When moving between "detection" towards "prevention" an essential need is added detection in real-time. In essence, companies must be able detect bots as quickly as they can, and also stop bots from doing the harm they plan to cause.

Before doing this, you need to realize that prevention means that your business should take into account your user's experience. It is essential that detection accuracy be of a high-end enough level to not detract from the seamless user experience that real users are used to. Only bots that are malicious have to be stopped. If legitimate users are misled by bots, you'll face more issues to deal with.

The positive side is the fact that it is possible to use a variety of advanced bot-prevention techniques that are high-level:

Bot Prevention Method #1: Blocking Traffic

Blocking traffic that you're confident originates from bots is an extremely efficient strategy. But, it is only used in situations where there's a high likelihood that you're confronted by the presence of a bot. Be aware that if you believe all bots are bots, you may be preventing legitimate users from using the network.

Generallyspeaking, the solutions targeted towards managing bots typically come with the capability to block bot traffic. But, they aren't the best at fighting other forms of fraud, and may cause a strain on resources. Instead, seek out solutions that are able to be combined to increase your overall fraud-blocking potential. For example, PingOne Fraud provides bot detection and is able to be coupled together with PingOne Authorize to accomplish this use case of bot-blocking.

Bot Prevention Method #2: Add a Challenge

Another method of preventing bots is to create an obstacle in the form of an CAPTCHA that is among the most commonly used techniques. The majority of users have likely encountered an CAPTCHA prior to. If done correctly, CAPTCHAs are great in creating the right degree of friction for users through making them have to solve a challenge that is otherwise difficult for bots. For instance, a grid pops up with various images you must identify.

Of course, it's real that advanced bots can avoid the CAPTCHA fairly easily through mimicking/mocking human mouse movements. There are also free software libraries that can be downloaded as well as tutorials for how to use them.

However it is true that the use of CAPTCHAs is a simple option that is effective in bot detection. While this isn't the most popular method of use among users, nevertheless the majority of us have become accustomed to it.

Bot Prevention Method #3: Incorporate an MFA Solution

A third way to stop bots is to integrate an MFA solution to your company as well as your customers. By imposing MFA can be utilized in situations where you suspect that the bot may be trying to access accounts, specifically bots that use credentials to gain access to account data and attempt to gain access. MFA does not just help to reduce this risk, but it also doesn't create friction for users who are legitimate. MFA will help you ensure that your users are who they claim they are, while also keeping bots off.

Other Options for Managing Risk from bots

Although the above methods help to stop bots, there's a different way to assist teams in preventing bots: getting inside the mindset of the attacker.

Bots are extremely sophisticated, but they are only as sophisticated as the individuals behind them. What makes someone who is a threat seek to make use of a bot in order to gain access into your network? Start by considering the motives of the attacker.

Think about the methods they might employ to execute the bot attack, which usually is in line with the motivation (but sometimes not).

The majority of bot traffic will be targeted at account takeovers by using brute force attacks in order to crack the password. In addition, bots can create numerous accounts to commit fraud at a massive scale. In general, by studying the session's characteristics Identity professionals can establish whether or not a person is a human. In order to do this, they should examine the specific methods that hackers might employ and the implications of these technologies.

There are a variety of techniques that can be utilized to create bots, ranging starting with the simplest technology that simply mimics what happens to the HTTP web traffic from a valid client (web browser or mobile app) to more advanced technologies that actually manage a legitimate client.

An excellent guideline is to use simpler technologies and bots are cheaper and easier to scale since they require less resources. This makes them less difficult to spot and avoid. Also, the more sophisticated bots are and the more niche the attack plan is intended to be and, consequently more difficult they will be to spot and stop.

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