Bot detection API, on your website, mobile application is the first step in order to stop automated assaults. It divides your traffic into requests made by people and those made by robots. Good bot identification is essential for safeguarding organizations against online security risks since harmful bots account for at least one-third of all web traffic worldwide.
The challenge of identifying bot traffic has increased. Developers of bots are continually coming up with new techniques to get beyond the traditional security measures that the majority of businesses still use.
Bot traffic: What is it
The total amount of bots visiting your websites, mobile applications, and APIs is known as bot traffic. Both good and evil bot activity exists. Site monitoring bots and search engine bots like the Googlebot are examples of good bot traffic. Bad bot traffic is any bot created to do tasks that might hurt your company or customers. What makes bot detection crucial?
The first step in preventing the most serious security dangers in today’s internet environment is bot identification.Without efficient bot identification, you might not even be aware that you are being attacked. A bot attack may go undetected until it’s too late, such as pricing or page scraping and account takeover fraud. For effective bot avoidance, good bot identification is a need. If you prevent malicious bots from accessing your websites, mobile applications, and APIs, you will:
- Reduce your IT costs
- Protect the user experience
- Keep one step ahead of your rivals
- Spend less time putting out fires
- Maintain compliance with data protection frameworks
How can you spot bots and bot traffic
Despite these difficulties, there are still a few oblique methods for detecting bot traffic. All of these signs point to malicious activity on your websites, mobile applications, and APIs:
- Extremely high pageviews. The goal of such bot assaults is to take down all of your servers. This will seem as a rapid, unexplainable pageview surge in your analytics program, whether it’s a DDOS assault or a lot of scrapers.
- Disproportionately high bounce rate. Each bot has a purpose. It usually departs as soon as it reaches its objective or realizes that it cannot. This will display an unnaturally high, quick bounce rate since bots may function in milliseconds rather than seconds.
- Unusual session lengths. Sessions that last only a few milliseconds or that are unusually long are suspicious. Humans typically stay on a page for at least a few seconds, but seldom for longer than a few minutes. Watch out for unusual session duration patterns in your analytics program.
- A surge in traffic coming from unidentified places. For instance, there’s a strong possibility it’s a bot assault if your company doesn’t operate in Vietnam but you suddenly start getting a lot of requests from Vietnam. Bot requests are frequently made when they come from nations that make no sense for your corporation.
- Shoddy conversions Are you getting illogical contact form submissions? Do certain users often add products to their shopping carts but never check out? Bouncebacks to your free newsletter have unexpectedly increased. These are all garbage conversions that show bot activity.
Techniques, tactics, and restrictions used to identify bots
CAPTCHAs– In the late 1990s, CAPTCHAs were developed to stop bots from spamming forums or search engines. Back then, bots weren’t that difficult to detect, and CAPTCHAs performed admirably for over 20 years. But CAPTCHAs have now become a concern for two reasons.
First, CAPTCHAs restrict access to the Internet. Because they can be difficult to resolve and increase friction at key places on your websites or web apps, they can destroy your conversion rates.Second, CAPTCHAs are not as effective at detecting bots as they once were. Today, a lot of bots utilize an API to connect to CAPTCHA farms, which can quickly and cheaply tackle any challenge.
WAFs- Online application firewalls are intended to defend websites and web applications from well-known threats including SQL injections, session hijacking, and cross-site scripting. They employ a set of criteria to separate the good from the bad bot traffic. Requests containing well-known attack signatures are especially sought after by WAFs. Therefore, WAFs are only able to stop known threats. They fall short in blocking the modern, highly developed bots that lack obvious attack indicators. Furthermore, a lot of bot assaults, such account takeover fraud, follow completely reasonable business logic.
In order to control bots, WAFs also primarily rely on IP reputation. If a request’s IP reputation is poor, it is assumed that any action coming from that IP will also be poor. On the other hand, if the reputation of the IP is excellent, it is likely to approve all requests originating from that IP. As previously indicated, high-quality, residential IPs can now be quickly and inexpensively rotated by bot operators, making a WAF an inefficient way to identify and stop bots.
MFA- An effective method for protecting a user’s account is multi-factor authentication. If customers have accounts on your websites or mobile applications, you should tell them to toggle it. However, you’ll soon realize that most users won’t bother. There’s just too much friction. Due to this, MFA can no longer be used as a security solution.
MFA can help protect your users against account takeovers and credential stuffing assaults, but it won’t shield your company from other bot attacks that can still do significant harm, including web crawlers or DDOS attacks.
Conclusion
Bot identification is more crucial than ever, but it is also more challenging. Bots impersonate humans using a variety of strategies, including CAPTCHA farms, genuine hardware, home IP addresses, and many others. WAFs, MFAs, and CAPTCHAs are no longer sufficient to prevent bots on their own.
You need sophisticated, cutting-edge bot detection technology to adequately safeguard yourself.
