What is bot mitigation and how can it benefit your business?

What is Bot Mitigation?

Bot mitigation is the process of using software, solutions and systems to detect, manage, and block bots and their traffic. The primary goal of bot mitigation is to distinguish between good and bad bots, allowing the former to operate while stopping the latter in their tracks.

Bot mitigation strategies usually involve various tools and techniques such as behavioral analysis, CAPTCHA challenges, and rate limiting to identify and block harmful bots without affecting the user experience for legitimate visitors. As the digital landscape evolves, so does the sophistication of these bots, making the role of bot mitigation ever more crucial.

Why is bot mitigation important?

In 2022, a staggering third of global web traffic was attributed to malicious bots. These aren’t just harmless automated programs scrolling the internet; many of these bots pose substantial threats, especially to businesses that have a significant online presence.

Malicious bots are at the heart of numerous cyber threats listed by OWASP, the Open Web Application Security Project. Examples of these threats include:

• Account Takeover: This is when bots use stolen data to gain unauthorized access to user accounts.
• Credential Stuffing: Bots attempt to login by trying various username-password combinations, often leveraging previously breached data.
• Scraping: This refers to bots stealing content or data from websites, which can then be used or sold for malicious purposes.
• Scalping: Bots buy out inventory, like concert tickets, in large quantities to resell them at a higher price.

Without an effective bot mitigation strategy, businesses face a plethora of challenges, which can have significant economic repercussions:

• Website Downtime: High volumes of bot traffic can cause websites to go down, leading to potential revenue loss.
• Degraded User Experience: A sudden surge in bot traffic can slow down a website, frustrating legitimate users and potentially driving them away.
• Infrastructure Costs: Handling increased bot traffic requires more resources, driving up costs for web infrastructure.
• Increased Personnel Costs: More personnel may be needed to manage, troubleshoot, and counteract bot activities.

Considering these factors, bot mitigation isn’t just about stopping unauthorized access; it’s about protecting the integrity of online operations, ensuring the best user experience, and maintaining the economic viability of digital platforms. Without a well-formulated bot mitigation plan, businesses leave themselves exposed to a myriad of risks, underscoring the importance of being proactive in this realm.

How to Spot Malicious Bots & Distinguish Them from Good Bots

The difference between good bots and bad bots lies in whether or not you want them on your website, app, or API. Good bots, like search engine crawlers or SEO scrapers, are beneficial to your website because they facilitate ranking on search engines and analytics. Bad bots, on the other hand, are programmed to act maliciously, without your permission. They will flock to your website in droves, using up server resources, skewing your metrics, and potentially even stealing your customers’ personally identifiable information (PII).

Recognizing the difference between good and malicious bots is a difficult challenge as technologies and strategies are evolving quickly. You can start by looking at :

• Frequency of Requests: Good bots often have predictable patterns, like search engine crawlers that visit to index your website. Malicious bots might make rapid, repetitive requests in a short span, indicative of attacks like DDoS or brute force login attempts.
• User Agent Strings: Good bots typically identify themselves accurately with user agent strings, such as “Googlebot” for Google’s crawler. Malicious bots often use generic or fake user agent strings, or mimic popular browsers to blend in.
• Source of Traffic: Good bots will usually have consistent IPs or IP ranges. For instance, Googlebot traffic originates from specific IP addresses. Malicious bots might use a wide range of ever-changing IPs or even hide behind proxy servers.
• Behavior on Site: Good bots respect the directives in robots.txt, a file that gives bots guidelines on what they can and cannot access. Malicious bots tend to ignore robots.txt and might attempt to access multiple restricted areas.
• Response to Challenges: Good bots will typically respond correctly to CAPTCHAs or similar challenges. Simple malicious bots will often fail these challenges or attempt to bypass them.

By understanding and monitoring these patterns and behaviors, businesses can better discern the intentions of bots on their platforms and act accordingly. Given the complexity and vast number of bot interactions online, it’s nearly impossible to differentiate between good and malicious bots manually; hence, companies require a dedicated bot protection solution to effectively manage and counteract these threats.

Overview of Bot Mitigation Solutions: How They Work & What They Do

There are a range of different ways to mitigate bot traffic. However, some are more effective than others.

1. Web Application Firewall (WAF)

WAFs can effectively patch vulnerabilities and block traffic from known undesirable user agents, IP addresses or even entire countries. However, they are unequipped to detect malicious bots that are able to mimic human behavior. WAFs require daily maintenance to keep up with the ever-evolving bot landscape, and new threats will only be identified after the damage is done. Therefore, it is important to consider using a specialized bot protection software in addition to your WAF. Learn more about using WAFs with bot protection software here.

2. Advanced Bot Mitigation Solution

Using an advanced bot-mitigation solution is essential in order to fully protect your business from bots and engage in bot attack prevention. Software like DataDome uses multiple algorithms to protect each specific endpoint against bot attacks. Every request to your websites or mobile apps is analyzed and either blocked or authorized in real-time. DataDome has a false positive rate of less than 0.01%, which means that real users (and good bots such as the Googlebot) are never blocked.

3. Traditional CAPTCHA, or reCAPTCHA

Traditional CAPTCHAs, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA, have been used as a form of bot attack prevention, to stop bots from spamming online forms. However, there are limitations to using traditional CAPTCHAs like reCAPTCHA to mitigate bots. Traditional CAPTCHAs are difficult to complete can cause issues for users using screen readers. Adding extra challenges for your users affects their experience on your website and app, leading to decreased conversion rates and increased bounce rates.

CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA’s efficiency at blocking advanced bots is limited. Thanks to CAPTCHA farms, bots are able to easily circumvent this method of bot mitigation.

4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the better prevention methods to stop bot attacks. MFA adds an extra step that makes carrying out the attack significantly more challenging for hackers. Unfortunately, it’s usually up to the user to decide whether or not to activate MFA. It’s hard to convince the user to do so for every website they have an account at. Many users won’t bother meaning that this is not a totally reliable solution.

Taking Action Against Bots with DataDome

While you could, in theory, track bot activity yourself through analytics for your website logs, your IT team has more important things to spend their time on. And when you factor in needing to allow good bots through to your website while keeping malicious bots out, whatever in-house solution you develop becomes more complicated every second.

The most efficient, effective way of both identifying and tracking bot activity—to then manage as desired—is using a bot mitigation tool. Bot management software should be suitably advanced to catch sophisticated bots that are using proxies, CAPTCHA farms, and other adaptations to evade detection. Look for solutions that:

• Analyze all requests in real time.
• Use both server- and client-side signals to identify bots.
• Provide an easy way to create an allow-list for friendly bots.
• Utilize machine learning to process signals and update protection.
• Have a research team that keeps the solution up-to-date with the latest bot trends.

For example, DataDome’s advanced bot and online fraud protection solution uses real-time data, server- and client-side signals, fingerprints, and many other signals to catch malicious bots before they reach a website, app, or API. All of these signals are fed into machine learning models to stay ahead of the latest bot trends, protecting businesses around the world from even the most advanced threats. The dashboard provides easy-to-read overviews of bot activity on your endpoints, while allowing for deep diving into singular requests. And lastly, the entire solution is backed by our skilled threat research team and 24/7 support.

Our BotTester tool can give you some insight into the basic bots your business is susceptible to. For a more in-depth look at the sophisticated threats your website, app, and API might be facing, try DataDome for free or book a demo today.