The increasing activities of malicious bots in recent years have been very concerning, since they are responsible for various types of cybersecurity attacks from content scraping to data breaches to account takeover attacks, among others.
To protect your network and system from these malicious bots, investing in a bot protection solution is necessary.
Why Your Site Needs Bot Protection
There are various ways bad bots can damage your site.
The presence of bots alone (not necessarily bad bots) can affect your site’s performance: slowing down your page speed, and potentially blocking legitimate users from entering the site when your server is overwhelmed by the influx of bot requests.
However, malicious bots can also perform various types of attacks that will negatively impact your site:
- Content scraping: while content scraping by itself is not illegal, cybercriminals can use the scraped content for various malicious uses, for example, selling your information to competitors or publishing your content somewhere else, ruining your SEO performance.
- Account takeover: bots can perform brute force attacks and credential stuffing attacks to steal user accounts, which in turn can lead to more damaging data breaches where hackers can harvest sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and others.
- Price scraping: especially important in eCommerce sites that rely on competitive prices (i.e. those selling tickets and hotel booking sites). Bots can spy on your price before it’s being published so your competitors can undercut you.
- Spamming attacks: bots can automatically post comments, interact with forms, and click on buttons on your site for various malicious means, like leaving false reviews or spamming your comment section with dangerous links.
- Malware: if your site security is not up-to-date, bots can inject malware codes into your HTML header or use other means to infect your site. Once infected, it can be very difficult to detect the code because they typically look similar to your site’s original code.
- Click fraud: bots can interact with your ads by clicking on them, skewing your ad’s click-through rate (CTR) which can ruin your ad campaign’s performance and increase the cost.
How To Choose The Right Bot Protection Solution
It’s very important to choose the right bot protection solution for your network or system. A bot management solution can be a substantial investment, so you’d want to make sure you are getting the maximum value out of it.
With that being said, it’s very important to evaluate the following points when choosing between different bot protection solution:
1. Accuracy and detection quality
It’s no secret that bot detection has become a very complex and challenging thing in recent years. Not only it can be very difficult to differentiate between good bots and malicious bots, distinguishing between bots and legitimate users alone can be very challenging.
Thus, it’s not easy to find a bot protection solution with adequate detection accuracy and quality. Simply not all vendors are up to the task: you’d want to choose the right vendor with enough experience, a good team behind it, and effective detection technology.
2. Ease of Implementation
To be truly effective, the bot protection solution must properly integrate itself into your existing network and security architectures. This can be a very complex process especially if your existing architecture already includes many different tools and solutions.
You’d like a bot protection solution that can be implemented seamlessly without needing you to go through a wide-scale integration effort or requiring major architecture changes. Ask your vendor what the typical onboarding process is like and how extensive the documentation will be. Bot protection solutions like DataDome allow instant integration with your existing architecture.
3. Customer Support
The ideal bot protection solution will block most malicious bot activities and attacks on autopilot without needing your intervention. However, obviously, no solution is going to be 100% secure, and in the event of severe attacks and emergencies, you might need hands-on help.
Check whether the bot protection vendor offers 24/7 customer support, how their SOC (Security Operations Center) operates, and what kinds of help can you expect in the event of emergencies.
4. Autopilot autonomy
We have briefly discussed this above, but in most cases, bot protection is not your organization’s core activity. So, you’d want a bot protection solution that can automatically detect and mitigate malicious bot activity in autopilot, without needing your intervention.
However, even if the solution does offer autopilot autonomy, make sure they produce detailed, real-time reporting and analytics so you can also evaluate their performance.
5. Versatility and personalization
How easy it is to implement customizations such as adding a new exception to the whitelist or changing rules/policies for a website. You should check whether the protection solution offers adequate personalization options, and how easy it is to make those customizations.
6. Scalability
That is, can the bot protection solution ‘follow’ you as you scale your network and system. You’d like a bot protection solution that offers an auto-scaling infrastructure and enough access points.
Conclusion
While good bots can be beneficial for your site and help your business in various ways, bad bots can also cause various negative impacts that can be very expensive to your business. This is why having the right bot protection solution is crucial if you want to protect your site from various cyber attacks without accidentally blocking legitimate users and traffic from good bots.
Datadome is one of the recognized market leaders in the bot protection and management industry, employing advanced AI and machine learning technologies to effectively distinguish between human users and bots, as well as differentiating good bots from malicious bots.
