Why Your Current Anti-Bot System Might be Failing
Anti-bot solutions have been around for a long time. Firewalls and WAFs are used by all kinds of businesses to protect their online assets from malicious bots. But as bots become more sophisticated and bot traffic volumes increase, many of these measures have become outdated and ineffective.
If your anti-bot system isn’t performing, it could open your site to serious data breaches and other threats like Credential stuffing attacks and online fraud. So what causes anti-bot systems to fail — and how can you prevent this?
Why is bot traffic increasing?
Data is increasing in value. Through web attacks like account takeover, card cracking, scalping, and credential stuffing, cybercriminals use malicious bots to harvest data from your business. They then use the information to steal directly from the user, or sell it on to other parties. And as internet usage grows, websites hold more valuable data than ever.
Because selling data is becoming more lucrative, cybercriminals are creating increasingly advanced bots to effectively evade existing security measures. In fact, this process has already begun. Bad bots now make up more than a quarter of all web traffic — so not only are bad bots getting more sophisticated, they’re also becoming more prolific.
As your website grows, it becomes more vulnerable to malicious traffic. That’s why you need to ensure your anti-bot system offers the right protection.
How are new threats impacting today’s anti bot protection methods?
It’s no secret that bot operators retool bots to carry out attacks persistently, frequently evolving their attack patterns to find a successful route beyond any bot measures in place. The evolving nature of attacks is nothing new, traditional solutions typically rely on signatures and rules to defend against known attacks. Where they often fall short is between the time an attack evolves to the deployment of the latest signature, patch or update. This gap is what operators seek to exploit.
Inability to ensure multi device coverage
With an overreliance on SDKs and JS code agent and client side solutions are not only at the mercy of a time based exploitation they are also at risk from user adoption. Protecting native mobile apps using traditional anti bot solutions is difficult and even when apps are updated of the back of lengthy development cycles, there is still a need for users to update apps and ensure they are protected. This uncontrollable element leads to fragmentation in your anti bots security coverage and could lead to gaps attackers can continue to exploit.
Inability to handle large traffic spikes
Attacks can generate unexpected and high volumes of traffic, if your bot solutions can’t handle high throughput or create high latency for end users, then some solutions may choose to not analyze all products or pass on a high level of potentially false positives to monitoring teams. This creates a potentially risky and poor experience for end users.
Slow response to Offensive AI adoption
Attackers are leveraging AI to accelerate and increase attack sophistication. This allows operators to carry out not only more attacks in parallel but increase the sophistication and speed of retooling. Combined this makes it much harder for any manual mitigation and monitoring to be successful. Combating offensive AI with forms of multi layered defensive AI is crucial for future anit bot effectiveness.
Is your anti-bot solution fit for purpose?
There are many anti-bot solutions out there, but not all of them are effective. Even if your solution used to work, sophisticated bots can outwit outdated anti-bot systems.
There are a few reasons your bot management system might be failing:
- Your system hasn’t been updated recently. Most anti-bot solutions rely on people to input rules that tell them which traffic to block. If your system doesn’t know about recent bot developments, it can’t protect against them
- Your solution uses agents, which are slow to react to attacks. Agent-based bot detection solutions take longer to identify and block attacks, increasing the chance of a significant data breach
- You’re passing information about your security system to the attacker. Client-side anti-bot measures inherently share information about your defenses to bot developers, so they can retool against your system.
How to switch to a new anti-bot system
If your anti-bot system isn’t as effective as it used to be, consider switching to an alternative bot management system.
Switching to another agent-based system can be time-consuming and costly to set up. By choosing a system with agentless architecture, you can start monitoring your website activity almost instantly — there’s no complicated set up process. We even offer urgent access to our anti-bot technology for businesses currently experiencing an attack, so we can help you block bot attacks and control damage.
Learn more about our anti-bot protection
Netacea’s bot management system is proven to spot and block 33x as many threats as standard anti-bot solutions. Powered by machine learning, our defensive AI rapidly learns about your specific bot traffic behavior so it can detect even the most advanced, aggressive brute force attacks.
