Bots lay a bad trip on customer experience - Are we securing enough?

Applications are essential to the business ecosystem. They aren't just being used for revenue generation, either. They create a crucial link between organizations and their lifeline (i.e., customers) and an entry point for hackers. We see a significant rise in digital traffic to public-facing websites has corresponded with an increase in automated attacks (i.e., Bot attacks). Imagine a Bot attack on a health care organization's web application; the impact is no longer limited to their infrastructure through a lateral movement. Instead, it directly impacts their customers from purchasing life-saving medicines. Are we securing enough?

Impact on customer experience drives investments in Bot Solution

The "2021 Bot Management Trends" report, based on a survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), exposed worries regarding a string of threats posed by bots. In the first quarter of 2021, ESG asked 425 cybersecurity and IT decision-makers with application security knowledge and responsibilities for their organizations about their perceptions of and responses to bot attacks.

The survey report states that, on average, 7% of the cybersecurity budget is allocated towards the prevention of bot attacks or bot-driven fraudulent traffic, engagement, and bad data. Further, 82% of organizations anticipate their spending on bot management to increase over the next 12- 24 months. With negative impacts to customer experience among the most common results of a bot attack and regaining that trust in a multi-quarter project, it is not surprising that these events create the greatest urgency for investment in these solutions. . The survey report also states that sophisticated bots have impacted 37% over the last year. More worrisome, though, is that 30% believe they have been affected by sophisticated bots but are not sure. 

Bot Management is the top 5 priority

With the overwhelming priorities for the security leaders these days, 9 in 10 respondents in the survey report indicate their organizations view bot mitigation as a top 5 priority. Further, 63% say their organization will increase focus on protecting bot-driven fraud and logic abuse applications moving forward. As a result, bot management has been elevated to an executive-level issue. The CTO, CISO, and other leaders own budget and final say over the tools implemented to address sophisticated bot attacks. So, while it is true that bot management is a team sport, requiring close collaboration across the security, IT, web, application, and fraud teams, the criticality of the issue calls for executive leadership. 

Yesterday's signatures can't detect tomorrow's Bot attacks

The same survey report states that perpetrators are evolving their attack tactics day by day. The level of diversity in the types of attacks experienced by our respondents last year highlights the difficulty in defending against sophisticated bots.  

Out of many of the complex attack techniques, DDoS attacks with overwhelming traffic, fake account creation content scrapping, and Account takeovers are critical attacks concerning most of them. These findings indicate the necessity to deploy a bot management solution that can detect the early indications of bot attacks and interrupt the forward motion from further damages.

What does it take to choose a Bot management solution?

• Ability to get visibility into good and bad traffic in a couple of minutes. As good bots are part of many organizations' lifelines these days.
• Ability to detect the early indications of Bot attack campaigns like ATO, Content scrapping through behavioral-based detections.
• Supported by a dedicated threat research team to constantly understand the evolving app threatscape and refine the detection models
• Unified solution to protect all the artifacts of a modern app attack surface like Web Apps, Mobile Apps and APIs etc. 
• Flexible deployment options to support to realize the organization's security strategy

Apps are the lifeline of everyone's business, secure enough.

Happy reading.