Why Bot Detection Solutions are the need of the hour
We are at the cusp of digital revolution. Digital influences everything, the way we read, travel, shop,view etc. and internet is at the epi centre of this. According to a report by Hosting Facts, there are approximately 1.24 billion active websites in the world and the statistic is expected to increase in the near future. Due to this uptick, many websites are witnessing heavy bot traffic. Frost & Sullivan states that bots account to nearly 70% of traffic on any given website. Such a high level of bot activity poses a number of serious threats in terms of network security, network performances etc.
Bots-The good versus the bad
While it is true that most of the malicious activities such as attacking, spamming, scanning and scraping are carried out by bots, they merely act as tools for the hackers. On other hand, there are a many bots that designed to perform valuable services to a particular website such as search engine optimization, content delivery through RSS feed, web indexing etc. Google, for instance, has a bot for categorizing its web content. However, the challenge posed by the bad bots or web scrapers is much higher and businesses are constantly spending large sums of money and resources to mitigate this threat.
Bad Bots bypassing the traditional security models: WAF just isn’t effective anymore
The process of detecting an advanced bot that mimics human users cannot be an objective one. Bot detection should also include various qualitative and subjective parameters such as identifying the type and intentions of a bot. Due to this reason various traditional security models such as IPs, code level security, NGFW are no longer a threat to the botnet builders. Most organizations may also build advanced WAF to forgo malicious online attacks. By developing an in-built run-time application self-protection (RASP) system in conjunction with secured coding practices, WAF can detect and adapt to threats in real-time. However, the truth is that even WAF is not equipped enough to tackle threats coming from automated sources who appear to be a part of legitimate traffic. When hackers write codes to a bot program they use sophisticated techniques to go undetected, so if a bot is designed to steal data form a particular website, a WAF will not be able to detect it. There is a growing need for webmasters and CxOs to adopt more advanced counter measures for protecting their application security and websites.
Importance of bot detection solutions
The absence of adequate tools for detecting and managing threats from botnet has given rise to the demand for developing end-to-end bot detection and prevention solutions. The major capability of such solutions is to distinguish bots form human users by utilizing micro challenges such as tracking cookies, JavaScript injection, mouse detection movements and CAPTCHA. Technological advancements like continuous cloud security intelligence enables the bot detection and bot management solutions to go beyond simple detection thus providing several data points pertaining to a particular bot’s actions, intentions and history. These data points enable the businesses to exercise more precise and targeted control on their webpages. Even though no network security can guarantee complete protection against online malicious threats, without an air tight web security and bot protection, websites are bound to fall prey to these online attacks.