What is bot mitigation? How to stop bots & botnets

Bot mitigation is the process of reducing the risk of automated bot attacks and stopping them from exploiting your websites, mobile apps, and visitors. To reduce and detect this harmful behavior, bot mitigation uses strategies that distinguish the good bots from the bad. With the right combination of intelligent fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and predictive methods, bad bots can be detected and mitigated in real time. Ultimately, it creates a safer digital environment for you and your users while also improving data accuracy, site performance, and customer trust.

Botnets and bad bots can flood login pages, shopping carts and payment forms. They tax organizations’ infrastructure, slow performance and increase your costs, which drives up operational expenses. Many efforts to mitigate or thwart bad bots – such as CAPTCHAs (challenge–response tests used to determine whether a website visitor is a human or a bot) and multifactor authentication (MFA) – frustrate human users and lead to website abandonment.

Bot mitigation involves the use of advanced capabilities and technologies to enforce policies that protect against bot attacks. This means using intelligence signals to detect malicious bot behavior at the onset of attacks and adopting a strategy for appropriate mitigation approaches. Bot mitigation solutions stop malicious bots before they affect websites, mobile applications and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Bot mitigation also critically involves distinguishing bots from real people, separating bad bots from good bots, and dealing with malicious activity. And this doesn’t just mean blocking. Other tactics include proactive measures to prevent bot attacks and redirecting the malicious web traffic elsewhere.

Once an organization starts doing business on the internet and starts getting steady visitor traffic, bad bots come with the territory. Bots account for approximately half of all web traffic. A successful bot attack can damage your company’s brand reputation, reduce consumer trust, and cause financial losses, making bot mitigation critical to business success.

Some bad bots flood web login fields with stolen credentials as cybercriminals try to gain unauthorized access to users’ accounts, significantly impacting your security. Others make modest purchases with stolen credit cards to determine active, viable accounts for future fraud. Bad bots load online shopping carts with high-demand goods and resell them at inflated prices. Still others execute content scraping to copy an organization’s intellectual property and product information and gain a competitive edge.

A further problem is that when you can’t distinguish bot traffic from human consumer traffic, it skews business analytics. Faulty analytics lead you to misinterpret trends and make costly mistakes. Effective bot mitigation stops the bots that start these cascading adverse effects, reducing your risk.

Carding bots: Carding bots test stolen credit and debit card details on site checkout forms and pages. These bots confirm active cards by attempting to make modest purchases on e-commerce sites. If a user’s payment goes through, the card number is validated and marked for future use. Most commonly, fraudsters use validated cards to buy gift cards, which are then used to make high-dollar purchases such as laptops, smart TVs, and smartphones with little scrutiny from card companies. The cybercriminals finish laundering the money by selling the goods online.

Credential stuffing bots:  Credential stuffing bots attempt logins across popular sites using lists of stolen usernames and passwords. When the credentials work, malicious hackers gain unauthorized access to user accounts. They can use this access to make fraudulent purchases with stored payment data, steal gift cards and loyalty points, submit fake credit applications, post fake reviews or sell the credentials to other criminal actors on the dark web.

Scalping bots: Scalping bots use fake accounts to snatch up high-demand goods, such as limited-edition sneakers, concert tickets and rare collectibles. Once the bots deplete a store’s inventory, cybercriminals can resell the items at a high markup on third-party sites or the dark web.

Scraping bots: Scraping bots routinely crawl the internet at scale, analyzing and copying product descriptions, images and prices from your sites for malicious purposes. Your rivals can use the data to compete with you on price, robbing you of profits. They may even republish your original images and content explicitly, which can lower your position in search engine rankings.

A bot mitigation solution prevents bot attacks, including DDoS attacks, using advanced detection and prevention techniques. These include behavioral analysis, intelligent fingerprinting and predictive analysis to identify malicious bots in real-time. Detection triggers enforcement technologies that block, rate-limit, or redirect bot attacks to decoy sites.

Here are some ways that bot mitigation solutions identify bots:

• Turn behavioral signals from users, browsers, and networks into dynamic behavior profiles that tell a story of how users interact with your business online. These profiles can be used to accurately pinpoint bots.
• Use fingerprinting and behavior modeling to identify bots when they visit your site.
• Analyze keystroke rhythm, cursor movement, course, and speed to look for anomalous behavior.
• Log IP addresses, session duration, bounce rate, and pageviews to find abnormal browsing and request patterns that signify bot traffic.
• Enable proof-of-work tactics to make it difficult and costly to leverage botnets at scale.

When a bot mitigation solution detects bots, it can trigger a range of enforcement actions:

• Limit how often a user can repeat an action, such as a login attempt, within a certain time frame. This is known as rate-limiting and will stifle botnets.
• Use deception techniques and honeypots to redirect bot traffic for in-depth analysis using forensic tools and techniques.
• Serve a challenge-response test, such as a CAPTCHA. One caveat is that CAPTCHA-solving bots are not deterred by this technique.
• Trigger multifactor authentication and ask users for additional verification that bots cannot complete.
• Block access to the page or site, effectively implementing a denial of service to malicious bots.

Bot mitigation solutions may also provide analytics and insights to aid forensic investigations and to enable customized reporting. This ensures that bots do not skew data and allows you to make intelligent business decisions.

Bot mitigation solutions don’t just put an end to bad and inaccurate website traffic. It helps to protect every part of your business’s digital presence. Businesses that rely heavily on digital interactions can benefit greatly from having effective bot mitigation solutions in place on their sites. By detecting and stopping bot attacks in real time, businesses can protect users’ sensitive data, reduce legal or financial breaches, and improve site performance. With the right tools in place, a strong solution can keep your systems safe:

Protect sensitive data. Before a bot attack compromises your system or takes sensitive information from your users, stop credential stuffing, account takeover and carding attacks.

Keep your brand reputation safe. Mitigating bot attacks lets customers know that your business is on a safe and secure platform, which helps build trust and retain customer loyalty.

Reduce IT costs. Bot attacks can lead to costly measures, and by filtering out the bad bots from the good ones, you’re able to free up storage and reduce the bad traffic on your servers, allowing for a better user experience.

Improve site performance. With fewer bad bots taking up space, your site can benefit from having faster load times and fewer glitches.

Provide better data for informed decisions. Having malicious bots roaming your site creates not only clutter that can slow down site speed, but also false traffic that can lead to inaccurate customer insights. By removing them as quickly as possible, you will have a better understanding of user behavior.

With bots constantly evolving and becoming a more dangerous threat to businesses, having reliable and effective mitigation solutions is essential.

Harmful bots may target industries that are especially vulnerable due to potential data theft, payment fraud, account takeovers, and more. Some of the most vulnerable industries are:

• Financial services – Financial services are often at high risk of account takeovers, credential stuffing, and fraud because of direct access to sensitive and financial data. In fact, the attempted attack rate on financial services businesses grew 130% year over year.
• Online gaming – Bots may try to target online gaming communities for virtual item fraud, account abuse, and unfair play advantages to manipulate leaderboards or economies.
• E-commerce – With more than half of all attempted carding attacks going to retail and e-commerce sites, they are most vulnerable to attacks on inventory hoarding, price scraping, and fake accounts, which can cause revenue loss.
• Advertising – Harmful bots can drive fake impressions and clicks, which can lead to skewed campaign data and drained ad budgets.
• Media or publishing – Targeted by bots inflating views metrics or scraping premium content to get past paywalls and reduce ad revenue accuracy, this industry’s scraping attacks have surpassed 16% of all attempted scraping attacks observed in 2024.
• Public or government institutions – These institutions are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns, data scraping, and denial-of-service attacks that can disrupt essential services.
• Travel sites – Typically targeted by bots looking to scrape fare data, hoard reservations, or attempt fraud during high-demand periods, this industry has reached an attempted attack rate of over 56%.

Bot mitigation should be a top priority regardless of the industry you’re in. While no industry is completely safe from harmful bot attacks, knowing which ones are most vulnerable can help you understand which aspects of your digital space can be most at risk.

Bot mitigation solutions detect and block bots that attempt digital attacks on your website. They act as a multifaceted approach to protecting your website’s cybersecurity:

• Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) monitor and filter traffic to block bad bots before they can infiltrate your web application. An essential part of mitigating bot risks, this security solution helps protect sensitive and private user data. There are three types of WAFs: network-based, host-based, and cloud-based. Each type of WAF offers its own unique solutions, each providing critical digital protection.
• Challenge-based Detection distinguishes between real users and bots by requiring short tasks to be completed, like image recognition or CAPTCHAs. These tasks are designed to be difficult for bots to complete, but rather simple for human users.
• Behavioral Analysis Engines track user behavior in real time to detect any questionable activities that deviate from typical human behavior and may indicate the presence of bots. Tracked behavior or data can include clicks, time on page, page visits, user’s device, browser, and more.
• Threat Intelligence software collects and analyzes data from bots to better understand targets and attack methods. Having this tool in place helps security teams make informed and data-driven decisions to stay ahead of bot threats and attacks.

Bot mitigation requires acquiring data before, during, and after an attack may take place, to continue to adapt to advanced attack methods, gather data, and be a proactive force when reducing bot risks. Investing in a bot mitigation platform that offers a variety of cybersecurity tools and capabilities that focus on all aspects of bot attacks is highly critical to maintaining a safe digital ecosystem.

Threats of bot attacks are ongoing and becoming increasingly harmful to users. Solutions must stay ahead of potential risks or be able to act quickly when malicious bots are detected. When mitigating bot attacks, consider solutions that are user-friendly, precise, speedy, and scalable to go against the ever-evolving bot technology. A few features to prioritize should be advanced machine learning, behavioral analysis, and real-time automations. HUMAN offers solutions that deliver these capabilities and more to provide unrivaled protection throughout your entire customer journey.

The Human Defense Platform detects and mitigates bad bots with unparalleled accuracy. It  includes the following capabilities:

• Account Takeover Defense
• Transaction Abuse Defense
• Scraping Defense
• Fake Account Defense
• Compromised Account Defense
• Ad Fraud Defense
• Ad Fraud Sensor
• Data Contamination Defense

Using a combination of intelligent fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and predictive methods, HUMAN mitigates bad bots in real time on web and mobile apps, and APIs. Our 400-plus machine learning algorithms evolve and become more sophisticated in real time to keep pace with morphing bot behaviors.

If required, HUMAN leverages Human Challenge, a user-friendly human verification system that weeds out bad bots without frustrating real human users. Human Challenge stops CAPTCHA-solving bots, accelerates human solve times, and reduces page abandonment. Furthermore, the solution is low latency and does not impact page load performance.

With 40-plus integrations, HUMAN’s solutions work with your existing infrastructure, preserve your application performance and extend bot mitigation across all your web and mobile applications, and API endpoints. It makes it faster and easier for developers to work in their organization’s hybrid environment. This includes seamless integrations with a wide range of content delivery networks (CDNs), load balancers, web and application servers, as well as leading analytics platforms to provide tailored analytics for your web properties.

HUMAN forms a robust and layered barrier against bots attacks, utilizing browser detection to identify and block malicious activities, wherever they happen along your users’ digital journey.

What is account takeover? | How to detect & stop it

Carding: what it is and how to prevent it

What is scraping? | Protection from web scraping & data scraping

What is bot traffic? | Block bad bots from attacks

What is bot detection? | How to detect & block bad bots