Bot Risk Management in a nutshell.
Posted on January 10, 2023
2 mins to read
What exactly are bots? First, let’s dispel the myth that bots are aggressive robots out to conquer the world. When you use Google search, you are interacting with a bot. Like a robotic vacuum cleaner, they are designed to perform specific tasks autonomously when triggered. However, they come in various shapes and sizes.
Bots are extremely effective at performing repetitive tasks, so no wonder they have become an essential tool in our business toolbox. At the same time, it’s no surprise that hackers try to use such a powerful force for malicious purposes.
The next concept to learn is a “botnet,” which is a group of bots that work together to perform malicious acts invisibly. Botnets are intended to collect sensitive information. They also attack, disrupt, and/or break APIs or perform a direct denial of service attack (DDoS attack).
What is the Bot Risk Management?
Bot Risk Management is specifically designed to prevent malicious bots and botnets from interfering with your company’s APIs or critical data. Combining Bot Risk Management with Web Application Firewall (WAF) and API Protection protects your applications from anything that comes their way, including botnet attacks.
A variety of security, machine learning, and web development tools are used in bot management to accurately assess bots, block malicious activity, and maintain the uninterrupted operation of legitimate bots. In other words, the Bot Risk Management strategy enables you to filter which bots are allowed to access your web assets. It is essential for preventing performance and security impacts on your site.
Bot Risk Management strategy helps you to avoid:
- Distributed denial of service attack (DDoS)
- Credential stuffing is an attack where criminals use bots to automatically try lists of leaked or stolen credentials until one is accepted.
- Gift and credit card fraud
- Web scraping protected content.
Modern bot management solutions investigate every visitor to a given site, whether they are human or not, and match them with a behavioral ID using static, challenge-based, and behavior-based approaches. They can successfully defend against malicious bots while ensuring uninterrupted access to a website for legitimate bots and human users.
