Threat Management vs. Bot Management: DataDome Releases New Dashboard

“Bot or not?” is no longer the burning question; by now, it’s well established that bots account for a significant portion of traffic across mobile applications, websites and APIs — and businesses are aware of the problem. But knowing you have a bot problem and understanding the automated threats bots represent are two different things. What companies need now is more nuanced, detailed insights into the types of attacks they’re facing

Why? Per Gartner, bot traffic continues to rise, along with the increasing sophistication of bots. Attackers leverage bots to automate their attacks onto enterprises’ online assets, including scraping, scalping and credential stuffing. What’s more, the rise of the “hu-bot,” a combination of specialized bots with human-operated fraud farm services, requires ever-improving sophistication in detection and mitigation.

In fact, bots have grown so sophisticated, they are now specialized by threat, requiring a tailored response for each threat across the board. In other words, endpoint protection — including mobile applications, websites and APIs– is absolutely critical. Bots and hackers alike will find, and target, any weak link in your infrastructure.

Unfortunately, many businesses are focusing on the types of attacks that generate news coverage, instead of those that cause the most damage to their bottom lines. Because of this, they’re spinning wheels trying to put out fires instead of preventing them. This leads to wasted work hours and unnecessary customer churn.

Case in point: 81% of surveyed CIOs and CISOs in Forrester’s State of Online Fraud and Bot Management report said they did not yet use a full bot management system, leading their companies to spend an average of 53 (!) working days across roles responding to attacks. As the saying goes, time is money… and nearly two months of responding to bot attacks is a waste of both.

A Market Shift

According to Gartner, at the start of 2020 bot management was at the “peak of inflated expectations” in the firm’s iconic “hype cycle”. In other words, businesses knew they needed a bot management solution in place, and thought implementing one would solve all of their problems like magic, ignoring the increasing sophistication of bots and the need for human-powered professional services to support the technology.

However, with more market education over the past year, businesses are now realizing that anti-bot technology is not, in fact, a silver bullet. Rather, to effectively fight attacks, you need a threat research team, a Security Operations Center (SOC), and better awareness about the types of threats bots represent. In Gartner terms, bot management is now entering “the slope of enlightenment,” signaling a growing awareness that a working knowledge of the next generation of attacks — and the full suite of expertise required to fight them — is crucial to future-proofing businesses.

The Future of Online Fraud & Bot Management

In line with this phase of “enlightenment,” we have revamped the DataDome dashboard to provide detailed, actionable insight into the specific threats our customers face in real-time — while also providing a benchmark of how threat levels compare to others in their industry.

After all, telling a business that “your login endpoint is facing critical credential stuffing attacks” is considerably more effective in combating online fraud and automated threats versus a simple, “you’ve got bots.”

With one click, you can dive deep into each attack. Key features of the new version include:

• The ultimate threat analysis tool: Understand at a glance, across any or all endpoints, when an attack happened, its duration, where the attack originated from, the domains and specific endpoints targeted, the top five targeted URLs, and how the threat level compares to similar attacks within the same industry.
• Data lake exploration: Take a deep dive into detailed data — including IP addresses, countries of origin, user agents, referrer domains, rules, rule types, session IDs and more — and try scenarios on 30 days’ worth of live traffic, instantly.
• Access control: Define and activate a response strategy based on threat types, then let DataDome do the heavy lifting.

Our Online Fraud & Bot Management solution is the latest step in a continuous journey of innovation to ensure we provide the best UI on the market. But don’t just take our word for it.

As one customer said, “We compared various vendors (enterprise and SMB), and Datadome came up on top because of the functionality, effectiveness, support and price.Datadome was the most effective in protecting our site and had the most customizability and support. Their team is amazing and always ready to help.“

Online fraud and bot management is no longer simply about identifying bots. It’s about identifying and blocking the threats that come with them. And that’s what DataDome’s new dashboard now represents. Sign up for our 30-day free trial to see how this affects the way you protect yourself.