Creating an effective bot management strategy

Good bots work in your website’s favour, while bad bots pave the way for damaging automated attacks. Does it mean you need a team that monitors bot activities, makes decisions on a case-to-case basis and manually blocks bots? No. That would be wasteful, inaccurate and costly. This is where an effective bot management strategy comes in handy. 

 

Good bots are those that look for and follow the rules of the website to perform useful functions. These include search engine crawlers, chatbots, performance monitoring bots, copyright bots, site monitoring bots, feed bots and personal assistant bots. 

 

Bad bots have malicious intentions and misuse online products and services. They scrape content and prices from websites, break into accounts to get illegitimate access, try to overwhelm servers, engage in resource misuse and assist financial frauds. 

 

What is bot management?

 

Bot management is a strategy or practice of understanding and analysing each bot’s activities, intent and behaviour on the network and filtering out bots based on their permissions. 

 

With healthy bot management strategies, you can increase the friction for bad bots and mitigate the associated risks while making the experience frictionless for legitimate human users. 

 

Bad bots cause different types of bot attacks, including DDoS attacks, social engineering attacks, spamming, click frauds, account takeovers, intelligence harvesting, content and pricing scraping, credit card frauds and credential stuffing. 

 

The impact of these bot attacks ranges from minor inconvenience to users to astronomical financial losses. But in almost all cases, bot attacks cost businesses reputationally, with massive loss of trust and high customer attritions. With effective bot protection strategies, you can prevent financial and reputational damages to your organisation through real-time monitoring, detection and mitigation. 

 

While good bots don’t have malicious intent, they may not always act in your favour. Effective bot management strategies will ensure that precious website resources aren’t wasted by good bots while also ensuring they don’t get blocked unnecessarily. 

 

So how do you build a healthy and effective bot management strategy?

 

   1.   Real-time, granular traffic monitoring 

 

A good bot management practice is to respond based on incoming traffic requests and user activity. You need an updated baseline of accepted behaviours, a set number of login attempts, allowed activities and permissions. You must continuously monitor incoming web traffic and look for anomalies. Based on real-time insights on such anomalous behaviour, you block bad bot traffic. 

 

   2.   Leverage new-age bot mitigation techniques and practices

 

Bot activity today is highly sophisticated, and bots are capable of replicating human clicks and mimicking human behaviour. You now need to not just differentiate between good and bad bot traffic but between human and bot traffic, since you don’t want to block legitimate human users from accessing your website.

 

You cannot rely on traditional bot mitigation measures and techniques amid bots’ increasingly sophisticated and lethality. You need to leverage new-age bot management techniques and practices such as fingerprinting workflow validation, behavioural patterns and heuristic analysis. 

 

These shouldn’t be performed manually but using the latest technology such as self-learning AI, automation, analytics and cloud computing. This way, you can infuse speed, agility, accuracy and flexibility in bot management. AI-powered bot managers can effectively analyse and filter out bad bots and anomalous behaviour within minutes. 

 

   3.   Adopt a combination of static, challenge and behavioural approaches 

 

Using a combination of all three approaches, you can effectively identify even the most sophisticated bad bots and stop them in real-time. 

 

• Static approach: A passive technique capable of identifying known and active bots based on signatures and patterns. 
• Challenge-based approach: Throwing challenges at the incoming traffic that bots cannot perform, such as CAPTCHA.
• Behavioural approach: Matching user activities and patterns to distinguish between human traffic, good bots and bad bots. 

 

   4.   Instant, intelligent, multi-layered protection

 

Choose a bot mitigation solution that offers comprehensive, intelligent, instant, and multi-layered protection against bot attacks, automated threats, and other known and unknown threats. It should ensure that your website is always available and secure. Also, ensure that the solution offers robust false positive and false negative management. 

 

Our AppTrana bot management solution helps filter out bad bots, allows good bots to access permitted web assets, and ensures legitimate human users have a frictionless experience.  

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To find more about bot management, read our whitepaper, Need for Managed Bot Mitigation Solutions

 

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By Vinugayathri Chinnasamy, Senior Content Writer at Indusface