Most internet traffic comprises bots. According to a report by the security firm Imperva, persistent bots accounted for 57% of the internet traffic. The aim of using a bot is to automate repetitive tasks. They can also exploit various vulnerabilities within a system and conduct cyberattacks. However, there are solutions that a company can use to protect itself from bad bots. Think about a variety of factors before selecting a bot protection solution for your business. In this post, we will look at those factors. Our goal is to help you arrive at a bot solution suitable for your business and allows its success.
Business Success: How to Choose Appropriate Bot Protection and Get Success in Business
Understand the goal of the bot operator
Is the bot operator trying to scrape your prices to compete better? Is he attempting to deplete the inventory from your site or even testing credentials to commit fraud later? When you understand the impact of bots on your enterprise, you can ensure that your purchase solution can solve the specific issue. The architecture of many solutions, for example, is that they require several requests before they detect a bot. Such a solution is not appropriately designed to stop scraping and account takeover attacks that happen swiftly.
Effectiveness of the solution
Looking down in the past, we can see how the attackers quickly adapt to various defenses that you put on. For bot mitigation to be successful, it must stop new bots and zero-day attack methods. The mitigation solution must stand the test of time and stop bots months and years later. It saves you the cost of subscribing to a mitigation solution month in, month out. Before making the purchase, ensure that you inquire about the steps being taken to provide long-term efficacy. Such measures should include the research and development of emerging automated threats and deterrence to reverse engineering.
Configuration, maintenance, and support
A bot mitigation solution should have as minimal configuration, support, and maintenance as possible. Does the mitigation solution make your life easier? Does it have the capabilities to adapt to the emergent threats and retooling efforts? Such considerations save your security team from updating and refining the detection rules constantly. Consider if the solution can run on autopilot or dedicated in-house expertise and time are required to ensure its success.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning
Does machine learning power the mitigation solution? Today, bot technologies have been developed to incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence. The bot developers use such technologies to evade detection and mimic human behavior. It is crucial to know that you are dealing with automation experts when purchasing a bot mitigation solution. Incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning, the bot solution streamlines the behavioral analysis of bots and bot activities. The solution can adapt with time and effectively stop the bots from affecting your online infrastructure. The belief within many bot service providers is that human monitoring is the best solution. Such an attempt will be futile because intelligent bots are faster than humans. “You need to fight fire with fire.” Therefore, the best solution to fight automated bots is the automated one.
Scalability and latency
No trade-off can exist between businesses and security. Ensure that you choose a robust solution, has the auto-scaling infrastructure and many PoPs. It ensures that there is zero impact on the human visitors to your site.
Security operations center (SOC)
The goal of a SOC team is to analyze, detect and respond to various cybersecurity incidents. While a solution can work on autopilot, some situations require a practical and hands-on approach. Enquire from the provider how their bot security operations center work and the survives included in the contract.
The partnership between the business and the bot service provider
Bots are indeed developing at a faster rate than we can keep up with. Therefore, look for a fraud prevention provider with whom you can partner. It helps you understand the signs of fraud and how you can adjust your policies to challenge or block fraud. The provider and the business can collaborate to detect and prevent various attacks, not just those that emanate from bots.
The detection quality of the solution
Detecting the bots accurately is challenging. Some providers do a better job in their detection than others. You should inquire if the provider has a trial version that you can use as a trial run. It allows you to test the solution against real traffic to evaluate how and what they block. The difference between what it stops and what it goes through can be eye-opening.
The comprehensiveness of the solution
When selecting a bot solution for your business, it is crucial to understand how comprehensive it is. It should have multiple defense layers. Besides device fingerprinting, use of CAPTCHA, and behavioral analysis, the solution should understand the vitality of preventing automated tampering of the client-side code. It should use tokenization to ensure authorization and anti-replay as additional layers. The ultimate weapon against the bot is an extra layer to monitor the client-side for behaviors that are not allowed. Through this, you can observe the activities on the client-side with finer detail. It enables you to spot a potential rogue code you can block before you execute it.
The capability of integration and portability
Before purchasing a bot solution, check if we can integrate it with other web application solutions. Therefore, it means that they both operate on the same management plane for adjacent functions. It makes their operationalization easier. In addition, ensure that the solution you purchase can cover all your applications such as web, mobile, or mobile app APIs. Good bot mitigation for your business should be able to handle attacks against all the above applications.
Cost efficiency
At last, it is essential to look at the cost efficiency before purchasing a bot solution. Cost is tied to all the above factors. You need to evaluate the price of a bot solution based on its functionality and capacities. What do you get from a solution? Is it worth the cost? Is the solution fulfilling your expectations? Since not all bots are bad. Therefore, there should be a synergy between threat protection and traffic costs.
Conclusion
Businesses consider bot solutions for protecting their technology infrastructure and not the business itself. Attackers use the bots to launch various attacks like account takeover, credential stuffing, spamming, scrapping, and other threats to a business. Therefore, it is crucial to have a bot protection solution to help avert such incidences. However, such a solution should be practical and ensure business success.
Source: Plato Data Intelligence
