What are Attack Profiles?

An attack profile is a group of malicious requests thought to be from the same attacker based on their characteristics and actions, within the context of bot management. By analyzing malicious traffic and isolating requests into distinct profiles, security teams can uncover hidden attack patterns and focus on the threats that matter most. Instead of sifting through a sea of bot “noise”, analysts can use attack profiles to gain visibility into the actions, capabilities, and objectives of specific automated attackers. This enables security teams to understand attacker intent, track evolving tactics, and prioritize responses accordingly — going beyond traditional bot management approaches such as volumetric anomaly reporting and basic signature mapping.

Attack profiles allow security teams to identify attacker behaviors with precision, understand bot sophistication levels and objectives, and build a clear, data-driven narrative of evolving threats. This level of insight saves analysts hours of manual investigation and provides leadership with clear, actionable intelligence on the nature and impact of automated threats.

Attack profiles are created by analyzing all current and historical malicious traffic in aggregate and grouping bot requests based on shared attributes such as behavior patterns, attack techniques, and infrastructure details. This process allows security teams to distinguish between different attacker profiles and track how their tactics evolve.

Modern bot management solutions leverage AI-driven secondary detection processes to analyze both current and historical traffic. These AI models automatically isolate bot requests into attack profiles that represent distinct threats. This approach provides a clearer view of how bots operate at scale and allows teams to identify specific adversary behaviors rather than just identifying volumetric anomalies in traffic.

Attack profiles continuously evolve as new data is collected. When fresh bot activity is detected, it is compared to existing attack profiles to determine whether it aligns with known threats or represents a novel attack pattern. This continuous learning and adaptation ensures that security teams always have up-to-date intelligence on the automated threats targeting their applications.

By using attack profiles, security teams can answer critical questions about their automated threats, such as:

• What were specific attackers trying to achieve?
• How did their tactics change over time?
• Where were these attack attempts originating from?
• What indicators distinguish one bot operator from another, and from legitimate human website visitors?

Understanding these factors helps organizations not only mitigate ongoing attacks but also anticipate future threats and optimize their defenses accordingly.

Bryan Becker, Senior Director of Product Management at HUMAN details how HUMAN Sightline uses attack profiles to give deeper insights into attacker behavior.

Security teams frequently face an overwhelming volume of automated traffic, making it difficult to distinguish between different attack sources, methods, and levels of sophistication. Attack Profiles provide a structured approach to analyzing, investigating, and responding to bot-driven threats by offering deeper visibility into distinct attacker behaviors. Key benefits to Attack Profiles include:

Focus and accelerate investigations

Attack Profiles help security teams quickly pinpoint attack origins, tactics, and objectives. Instead of spending hours analyzing raw traffic logs, analysts can instantly see how bots behave, which attack paths they follow, and whether they target specific assets or user flows. By surfacing distinct bot activities and changing behaviors, attack profiles eliminate noise and highlight the attacks that matter most.

Turn security data into actionable threat intelligence narratives

With detailed attack profiles, security teams can transform raw detection data into meaningful intelligence. Attack Profiles provide visibility into attacker methodologies and infrastructure, making it easier to track campaigns over time. This insight enables teams to prioritize responses based on attacker sophistication and intent, rather than relying on broad, reactive measures.

Security leaders can also use Attack Profiles to communicate threat intelligence to business stakeholders. By presenting data-driven attack narratives, security teams can showcase trends, demonstrate the effectiveness of their defenses, and justify strategic security investments. This bridges the gap between deep technical analysis and executive-level decision-making.

Adapt security strategy to evolving threats

Attack Profiles offer continuous visibility into how automated threats change over time. By tracking attacker adaptations, security teams can fine-tune their defenses and proactively adjust their mitigation strategies. This ensures a continuous line of sight and continuous protection against threats as they evolve over time.

This level of adaptability is critical in defending against sophisticated bot operators who continuously evolve their tactics to evade detection. With attack profiles, organizations can anticipate shifts in attacker behavior and ensure their defenses remain effective against emerging threats.

Traditional bot mitigation strategies often focus on reporting volumetric anomalies and blocking traffic based on predefined rules. While these approaches are essential, they do not provide insight into the specific threats that an organization is facing. Attack Profiles fills this gap by offering a structured way to analyze and track bot attacks at the profile level level.

By implementing Attack Profiles, security teams gain a deeper understanding of their adversaries, improve their ability to respond to threats and enhance their overall security posture. As automated attacks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, attack profiles will become a critical capability for any organization looking to stay ahead of evolving bot threats.

HUMAN Sightline makes Bot Defender the first bot management solution to introduce attack profiles, setting a new industry standard for understanding and mitigating automated threats. By isolating automated traffic into distinct attack profiles, security teams can uncover exactly what each attacker is doing on their application. HUMAN Sightline enables analysts to drill down into profile details, including top routes, ASNs, IPs, regions, actions taken, and why traffic was flagged as malicious. With this level of visibility, security teams can turn raw data into actionable intelligence, continuously monitor evolving threats, and proactively adapt their defenses. Attack profiles in HUMAN Sightline represent the new standard for bot management, transforming how organizations investigate, report, and respond to automated attacks. As automated attacks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, attack profiles will become a critical capability for any organization looking to stay ahead of evolving bot threats.

HUMAN Sightline revolutionizes bot management by delivering unmatched visibility into specific attackers and their evolving tactics. Leveraging advanced AI, HUMAN Sightline automatically isolates malicious traffic into distinct attack profiles, allowing analysts to dive deep into each adversary’s behaviors—including targeted routes, IP addresses, regions, evasion techniques, and precise indicators used to identify them. This granular intelligence empowers security teams to move beyond generic bot detection, continuously adapt defenses as attackers pivot, streamline investigations with unprecedented speed, and clearly communicate threats and mitigations to stakeholders.

Learn more about HUMAN Sightline here, or reach out to sales to book a demo.