How Well Do UK Businesses Understand Bots?

Data breaches are becoming increasingly common, with cyber criminals able to gain quick and easy access to usernames and passwords. Despite efforts to inform consumers about cybersecurity best practices, many still use the same weak passwords across multiple accounts.

Netacea, along with independent researchers Coleman Parkes, recently carried out a survey 200 UK businesses to discover how well the bot threat is understood across travel, entertainment, e-commerce and financial services.

Crucially, we wanted to know if organisations recognised the risks associated with bots and how they were addressing the challenge.

In the first of our four-part blog series, we provide an executive summary of our findings and helpful accompanying infographic.

What we discovered

While there was a good understanding of the havoc bots could wreak, responses cross-sector were not consistent with our experience and visibility of the problem.

To reduce the threat of attacks, 91% of businesses have a full or partial bot management solution in place, with 76% of businesses stating that they have suffered a bot attack in the last two years.

Businesses lack visibility

Businesses are likely to be under attack right now and yet are unaware, while secure in thinking that they have the solutions in place to keep their bot problems in check.

Our findings reveal that solving the bot attack problem may be difficult, as very few businesses have a single department in charge of bot mitigation. Instead, the responsibility is held by several departments, which makes making big changes and quick decisions a challenge. This means that potential changes are likely to be passed around rather than acted on. For instance, the average business has 3.7 departments involved with managing bot activity.

The constant problem for security is visibility, as you can only defend against what you can see. Bots are becoming more sophisticated and developed to avoid traditional detections to blend in with human traffic, therefore the controls designed to manage them must also become much more sophisticated.

It’s critical that businesses understand the problem of sophisticated bots, how bots operate and the wider ecosystem to protect themselves and their customers. Read the complete report for an in-depth analysis of the current state of bot management in business.