Are High-Security Checks Worth It?

by Gergo Varga
Fighting malicious bot traffic has become a daily chore for many companies. Let’s dive into the problem of bots, botnets, and how to become more efficient at bot mitigation.
Bot mitigation is the process of filtering bot traffic on your site. Its key goal can be to accept good bots and block out malicious bots. Bot mitigation is an integral process of modern cybersecurity, fraud prevention, and risk management.
A bot, or Internet bot, is a software application programmed to perform online tasks automatically.
A botnet is a network of bots, or numerous computers connected together to perform the same repetitive tasks together.
According to research by Imperva, bots accounted for over half of all web traffic in 2020.
While many people think of bots as nefarious programs, it’s actually important to distinguish between good and bad bots. Here are various kinds you may encounter on the Internet.
In the first category, we’ll look at bots that are useful and should, in most cases, be allowed on your site. These include:
Combining machine learning, sophisticated algorithms and human intelligence, advanced technology can detect patterns that fraudsters aren’t aware of.
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Regardless of what kind of bot traffic you attempt to mitigate, there are three key steps in the process.
Bot mitigation techniques vary based on the kind of threat you face.
Mitigating bot traffic can be a complex affair. This is why it’s always good to take a multi-layered approach, by enabling more than one mitigation solution.
Captcha is one of the most famous challenge-based bot mitigation solutions. It’s also one with the most hit-and-miss results. While Forbes, for instance, claims CAPTCHAs reduced bot-driven submissions to website forms by 88%, many companies (such as ours) have stopped using it on account of its poor accuracy results.
On the plus side, Google’s latest Captcha v3 introduces the idea of risk scores, so it’s not so much a clear-cut case of accepting or rejecting traffic based on the outcome of the challenge.
WAFs can protect web applications from attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection and session hijacking. A Web Application Firewall analyzes incoming traffic, checks GET and POST-based HTTP requests, and feeds the data through static rules.
Last but not least, you could look at a complete all-in-one solution for bot mitigation, provided by a third-party company. Most bot detection software is available under a SaaS, pay monthly model, and the good news is that it’s easier than ever to integrate into your website via API.
You can read more about the best bot detection software.
SEON is a fraud detection specialist, with all the right risk-scoring tools needed for bot mitigation.
This includes powerful velocity rules (to understand how often a user does something), complete device fingerprinting and IP analysis (to understand how they connect to your site), and browser and cookie hash (to spot connections between users)
Best of all, you can integrate via API, try the tool for free for 30 days, and get complete control over your risk strategy thanks to custom rules and machine-learning rule suggestions.
SEON’s anti-fraud tools are designed to detect suspicious usage and uncover hidden fraudsters
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Yes. Bots can be detected and filtered out with the right rules, challenges, or other detection methods.
You can spot bots and botnets via firewall filters, challenges, or signature detection, amongst others. Advanced bot mitigation software offers risk scoring so you can control bots with more flexibility.
Some bots have nefarious purposes, such as buying an entire shop’s inventory, breaking into user accounts, or a DDOS bot attack. Others are useful to index your site with search engines or check for copyright infringement.
A good bot mitigation strategy should include multiple layers of protection such as Captcha, WAF, and the deployment of specific bot detection software with risk scoring. Device fingerprinting and IP analysis are increasingly popular solutions for filtering out bot traffic.
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Gergo Varga is SEON’s Product Evangelist. With more than 10+ years of experience in the Hungarian and international risk management sphere, he has developed an astute knowledge of RiskOps and Open Source Intelligence. He is the author of SEON’s Fraud Prevention for Dummies guide.
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