Top 8 Bot Detection Software & Tools

What Is a Bot Detection and Mitigation Software?

Bot detection and mitigation software allow you to let through legitimate traffic and identify and/or block bots. By extracting data relating to the connection type or device used, you can understand whether a visitor is a human or a bot.

Regardless of your industry, it’s important to understand who your web visitors are. Bots, which are essentially scripts, or computer programs, aren’t always nefarious but are still worth investigating, as they can be closely connected to cybercrime and online fraud.

Top Features of Bot Detection and Mitigation Software

Bot detection service vendors deliver techniques that vary, but there are a few recurring features, such as:

• IP lookup and analysis: Understanding the type of online connection used by your website visitors can filter out bots and let through humans. 
• Device fingerprinting: Analyzing the combination of software and hardware used to connect to your site can point to suspicious activity – especially for botnets using the same devices or spoofing tools.
• Velocity risk rules: In bot detection, velocity rules allow you to learn how often someone does something online, providing insight into their behavior and motivation. This helps you identify bots that perform the same action or sequences of actions repeatedly. 
• Real-time alerts: You may have to deal with spikes in traffic that could point to a botnet attack. It’s important to safeguard your website by creating fraud alerts for that purpose. 

10 Bot Detection Software Solutions 

Why Do Criminals Use Bots and Botnets?

Bots are computer programs designed to run autonomously. More importantly, they can automate repetitive tasks that would take too long to perform manually. 

Whenever fraudsters or cybercriminals need to replicate the same actions hundreds, thousands, or millions of times, they rely on bots or botnets (malware-infected computers linked together) to perform their dirty work.

In terms of where these are located in the world, according to the Spamhaus Project, India currently leads with the number of botnets (665,710), closely followed by China and the US.

What Kind of Attacks Can Bot Detection Software Prevent?

While there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to bot detection software, the key use cases are to prevent the following attacks:

DDoS Attacks

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a malicious action that aims to disrupt a targeted website by overwhelming it. 

It’s rarely possible to coordinate attacks on such a scale manually, which is why bots and botnets are employed to scale the number of actions until the server, service, or network cannot deal with the incoming traffic. 

As reported by Corero, a single DDoS attack can cost a company up to $50,000 in lost revenue, and 87% of queried companies expressed concern about this particular type of threat. DDoS attacks have increased since IPv6 became a new internet standard.

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks are often launched with the purpose of extracting key information from an organization’s employees or users.

Spam campaigns and mass SMS campaigns, for instance, are only possible to automate with bots – as the manual workload would be too heavy for an attack with such a low success rate.

According to Comparitech, most targets of phishing attacks are software as a service (SaaS) and webmail companies, closely followed by financial institutions and payment companies.

Brute Force Attacks and Credential Stuffing

Brute force attacks are performed with software (bots) that go through entire lists of passwords to try to crack user login details. Sometimes the passwords are generated programmatically; other times, they are taken from leaked databases and tested via credential stuffing. 

This is a growing concern, as the amount of data leaked on both darknet and clearnet websites shows no signs of slowing down. Every year brings a new record data breach, with billions of account details available online for fraudsters to exploit.

Bonus Abuse

As more and more companies offer referral bonuses and promos for new signups, fraudsters use bots to automate the process and reap the rewards. This is damaging to your marketing and analytics and could open the door to more fraud attacks in the future.

Bonus abuse is a major pain point at online casinos, but not exclusively for them. Companies in fintech, travel, and other sectors can also offer bonus schemes that they want to safeguard.

iGaming Fraud

Online gambling has some very specific bot problems, where criminals use software to automatically place bets and play certain games, such as online poker, to enable iGaming money laundering and other crimes and scams. 

In 2020, for instance, a data leak exposed one of the biggest poker botnet rings ever identified, after it played 60,000 sessions on 50 sites and earned up to $3 million.

Ticket Scalping

Events and ticketing companies have to control who buys their tickets. Fraudsters can use bots to automatically buy all of them before reselling them for a higher price.

This is called ticket scalping and is terrible for ticketing companies’ reputations – which is why, in 2017, Ticketmaster, one of the largest online ticket sellers, filed a lawsuit against Prestige Entertainment for its continued use of scalper bots.

Fake Reviews, Posts, and Comments

Any crowdsourced website can be targeted by bots for various reasons. This damages your business reputation and can make life harder for legitimate visitors. 

Nobody wants to visit a review website found not to feature legitimate reviews. Fortunately, anti-bot and other fraud prevention software can stop fake reviews.

Scraper Bots

Scraping is the practice of automatically gathering data from other online sources.

It’s a problem in online retail, for instance, where scraper bots automatically gather product prices before sending them to your competitors so that they may undercut you.

Marketing Fraud

Any kind of marketing technique that relies on heavy traffic (pay per click, pay per lead, pay per impression) can be exploited if the traffic is made up of bots. Affiliate marketing fraud, for instance, can be hugely detrimental to your efforts and bottom line.

This means your marketing spend isn’t going as far, and you have to deal with junk traffic, fraudulent affiliates, and potentially damaging business relationships.

What Must Bot Detection Software Do?

Broadly speaking, there are three goals a good bot detection software should meet:

1. Monitoring websites, networks, or applications.
2. Identifying bots or any malicious bot activity.
3. Preventing access or blocking actions performed by botnets.

In cybersecurity, many botnet detection strategies revolve around data packet analysis, which can identify irregularities in data transmission to a server. 

In fraud prevention and detection, a combination of risk rules will help highlight suspicious bot activity, which can then automatically be blocked or reviewed.

Choosing Your Bot Detection Software

Bot detection software comes in many shapes and sizes. In fact, the biggest challenge when choosing the right tool is starting with a good understanding of the kind of attacks that target your company and what might crop up further down the line.

This is why it’s important to consider different tools based on your business goals. Whether you need a complete fraud prevention solution or something specific for Google Ads fraud and DDoS, we hope this guide will help you choose the best solution for your business.

FAQs

Sources

• VIP Grinders: Massive poker bot farm detected across multiple online poker sites
• Corero: Impact of DDoS on Enterprise Organizations
• Comparitech: Phishing statistics and facts for 2019–2021
• Ticketnews: Ticketmaster, Prestige Entertainment Settle “Bot” Case in California