Understanding Bot Management & Protecting Against Attacks

Bot management is a segment of software solutions that are put in place to mitigate business risks from bot attacks on modern web applications and sites. Recent innovations to these solutions have addressed the increased size and sophistication of bot attacks on modern web applications. Malicious bot activity can range from account takeover and credential stuffing to web scraping on forums, carding and denial of inventory and scalping.

It’s more important than ever to keep your web applications protected. And that means more than distinguishing good bots from bad bots. A bot management solution should integrate seamlessly with your entire tech stack to foster advanced, proactive protection and real-time bot detection across your organization.

Bad bots are software applications that perform malicious automated tasks online. They mimic human behavior to get through security efforts put in place by businesses, steal sensitive data, disrupt online services, and manipulate systems.

Some bots are good and prove helpful for businesses, like search engine crawlers that index content, or customer service bots that enhance user experience. Good bots usually follow the rules set by site owners and provide value, instead of harm, to users and businesses. Alternatively, bad bots can scrape your website content, steal login credentials, commit fraud, and even bring your site to a crawl.

If bad bots are left to roam and disrupt websites, they can quietly diminish customer trust and end up costing your business revenue and resources.

Bot management systems use multiple technologies to help distinguish between good bots, bad bots, and real human users. Effective bot management strategies usually include three main approaches:

• Static Analysis: Examines incoming traffic for known bot signatures, IP addresses, and device fingerprints.
• Challenge-Based Analysis: Presents verification challenges like CAPTCHAs or behavioral challenges to determine if the visitor is human or a bot.
• Behavioral Analysis: Studies interaction patterns that mimic human behavior, like mouse movements, scrolling, and typing cadence, to better detect non-human activity.

Bot management products must not only protect web apps from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and unauthorized access by bots in real-time, but also obscure their defenses against cybercriminals.  The best bot management solutions can distinguish between bot traffic and legitimate users through a combination of machine learning, environmental data, traffic volume and device fingerprinting, addressing various challenges in bot detection.

Truly effective bot management solutions don’t disrupt real users while detecting and blocking bad bots in real time. Some of the most commonly used methods include:

• Static Analysis: Identifying known bots based on device, network, or fingerprint signatures.
• Challenge-Based Verification: Deploying CAPTCHAs, human interaction proofs, and invisible challenges to filter bots.
• Traffic Volume Analysis: Monitoring traffic spikes and abnormal usage patterns that often signal bot activity.
• Traps and Honeypots: Laying hidden traps (like invisible fields) to catch bots interacting with elements real users would never see.
• Behavioral Analysis: Comparing real human behavior to anomalous patterns in navigation, speed, and engagement.
• Rate Limiting: Throttling request rates to limit automated interactions without affecting real users.
• IP Blocking: This method helps block known malicious IPs, IP ranges, and geographies associated with botnets.
• robots.txt Files: Though malicious bots often ignore these files, they set crawl instructions for legitimate bots.

Managing bot activity effectively requires multiple solutions and technologies that can continue to adapt as quickly as bot threats evolve. Security and IT teams typically use these tools to fight against bot attacks:

• Web Application Firewalls (WAFs): Filter out malicious requests before they reach your servers.
• User Behavior Analytics (UBA): Study user interactions to detect bot-like anomalies.
• Threat Intelligence Feeds: Stay ahead of known botnets, IPs, and evolving attack patterns.
• Bot Pattern Databases: Maintain updated databases of bot behaviors, fingerprints, and attack signatures.
• Dedicated Bot Management Solutions: Purpose-built tools that combine detection, mitigation, and real-time adaptation.

Machine learning technology supports these tools to continuously analyze interactions and adapt to new attack techniques. Choosing the right tools is essential to protect your business and avoid ever-evolving online threats.

Bots are becoming increasingly advanced, and waiting until a bot attack has occurred is not enough to keep your digital ecosystem safe. The volume of malicious bots crawling the internet is quickly rising, resulting in an increase in credential stuffing, fraud, and the spreading of spam content across all industries. These affect all areas of modern business infrastructure, including web applications, mobile apps and APIs.

Businesses are putting themselves at risk of security breaches, data leaks, and financial losses by not having active bot management solutions in place. It’s critical to understand the different ways bots can impact your website. Some of the most common threats from malicious bots are:

• Web Scraping: Bots can be programmed to steal valuable or sensitive information from your website. Cybercriminals can use scraped data to repurpose your content or undercut pricing, which can ultimately lead to a damaged brand reputation and loss of revenue.

• Credential Stuffing: Modern technology allows bots to rapidly test stolen usernames and passwords across multiple sites. Cybercriminals can then break into personal accounts to commit identity theft, financial fraud, and other serious data privacy violations.

• Brute Force Attacks: By continuously attempting to guess account password combinations, bots can access and compromise user accounts, corporate systems, and sensitive data.

• Click Fraud: Occurs when bots simulate clicks on paid ads, which can provide inaccurate performance metrics. This depletes businesses’ funds and marketing efforts due to high engagement rates but low true customer interests.

• Spam Content: Bots can be the cause of floods of spam originating from website forms, comment sections, reviews, and customer support channels. They tend to bury real user interactions, causing a blow to a brand’s reputation and draining resources to clean up the flood of spam.

• Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks: In a DDoS attack, botnets release an overwhelming amount of traffic to a website’s servers to force them offline. These disruptions, whether taking place for a short period of time or not, can cause major damage to a business.

Defending your website against these attacks takes modern, adaptable bot management solutions that act ahead of time, during, and after a malicious bot breaches their digital ecosystem. Only solutions that combine the efforts of machine learning, real-time behavioral analysis, and scalable threat intelligence can help block and mitigate malicious bots.

The most beneficial bot management strategies should work in real-time and use innovative measures to defeat bots. The benefits of bot management exceed protecting your website infrastructure. It provides protection for customers and has advantages for security, IT, and marketing teams. Here are a few ways a strong bot management system can improve your business outcomes:

• Improved User Experience: Instead of having an influx of bad bot traffic, mitigation allows for faster load times and fewer disruptions for real users.
• Reliable Analytics: Filters out fake bot traffic, so businesses can have accurate data for informed decisions.
• Better Ad Budget Allocation: Instead of receiving false engagement metrics, marketing teams can ensure that their efforts are targeting real user traffic and interactions.
• Lower IT Costs: Reduces the burden on IT resources by lowering the need for manual security intervention.
• Better Server Performance: Actively having bot management systems in place reduces cluttered traffic and maintains a smoother, more reliable digital experience.
• Enhanced Security: Proactively block attacks that target user data and system vulnerabilities.

With the right tools and strategies, you can preserve the trust of your users, optimize your entire business infrastructure, and stay ahead of emerging bot threats. In a digital environment where bots continue to grow smarter by the day, strong bot management can turn vulnerabilities into advantages.

Your digital storefront is the primary avenue for consumers to discover, experience, and interact with your brand. Because of this, bot management is especially critical for digital businesses. Some industries can be especially vulnerable to bot attacks, including:

• Retail and E-commerce: Protect inventory, customer accounts, loyalty programs, and checkout processes.
• Financial Services: Prevent account takeover, carding, and fraudulent transactions.
• Travel and Hospitality: Guard booking systems from scalping and fake reservations.
• Food Delivery and Service: Defend loyalty credits and online ordering systems from exploitation.
• Media and Publishers: Protect ad revenue by eliminating fake clicks and impressions.
• Advertising Platforms: Maintain network integrity by ensuring real human engagement.

Cybercriminals abuse popular storefronts with malicious bots that buy out and scalp inventory, steal credentials, and empty accounts of loyalty points and credits. Effective bot detection tools can protect your user experience, website and business.

Bot management solutions must match and oftentimes, exceed the advanced technology of modern sophisticated bots by being adaptable, learning, and evolving just as quickly as the attackers they defend against to protect users throughout their entire journey. If not, businesses risk being vulnerable to invisible attacks.

Leading bot management platforms, like HUMAN Bot Defender, deliver comprehensive protection through features like:

• Behavior-based detection: Analyze real-time user behavior across hundreds of signals—including mouse movements, scroll patterns, and click speed—to accurately distinguish between humans and bots.
• Machine learning and threat intelligence: Continuously train models on vast datasets of real-world attacks and integrate live intelligence feeds to stay ahead of emerging threats.
• Device and network fingerprinting: Identify bots based on subtle differences in browser and device characteristics, even when attackers attempt to spoof or obfuscate them.
• Real-time mitigation: Stop malicious activity instantly without impacting performance, using edge-based decision-making and mitigation.
• API and mobile app protection: Extend defenses to APIs and mobile applications, which are increasingly targeted by sophisticated bots.
• Bot insights and reporting: Gain full visibility into traffic composition, bot behavior, attack patterns, profiles, and trends with intuitive dashboards and in-depth reporting tools.
• Flexible integration options: Deploy easily across existing infrastructures with support for major CDN providers, cloud platforms, and web servers.
• Adaptive learning: Defenses get smarter over time, continually learning from new data to block even the most evasive, polymorphic bots.

Having these features to mitigate threats fills in potential gaps in protection. The best bot management solutions do more than just rate limiting or CAPTCHA. Key functionalities for a bot mitigation solution include 10 criteria, according to Forrester Research. Meeting as many of them as possible will ensure your web and mobile applications are protected from automated threats as they continue to evolve.

Bot management can and should be an integrated effort between application development teams, developers, and security teams. By aligning these roles, you can overcome the risks associated with rushing code to deployment, and smoothly implement bot management earlier in your web application development cycle.

HUMAN is a leader in the bot management solutions industry due to our unparalleled detection accuracy and speed, the largest collective defense network in the industry, and our focus on ensuring a secure environment for you and your customers. Our platform protects the full customer journey across web, mobile, and API surfaces while catching even the most advanced, evasive threats in real time. With the largest threat detection footprint on the internet and a focus on precision, HUMAN blocks automated attacks before they can reach your business.

HUMAN focuses on scale, speed, and precision so you can focus on what matters most to your business. Our multilayered detection combines machine learning, behavioral analysis, fingerprinting, and threat intelligence to accurately differentiate bots from real users. With this strategy and with every attack detected, defenses are strengthened across our network, ensuring that you have security across every platform.

See how others have benefited from the HUMAN advantage here.

Do bot management tools protect apps?

Yes, bot management tools protect web applications, mobile apps, and APIs from threats.

How does a bot work?

Modern bots can be programmed to mimic human behavior like clicking, filling out forms, or browsing, and at much faster speeds than real users. Bots can also be useful and can carry out tasks like search engine indexing, collecting data, and monitoring website behavior.

Are bot attacks becoming more common?

Yes, bots are constantly evolving both in volume and strength. Attackers are programming smarter bots that overtake basic defense methods, which is why it is imperative to have bot management systems in place that are supported by machine learning technologies.

How do I know if my website has a bot problem?

Bots are detected by abnormal behavior occurring on your website. Signs can include traffic from unfamiliar locations, high login failure rates, rapid account creation, inflated ad engagement metrics, and slower website performance.

Do bot management solutions affect user privacy?

No, bot management solutions are to protect user privacy and focus on behavioral insights, device characteristics, and network patterns rather than personal data.

Are CAPTCHAs enough for bot protection?

No, with malicious bots constantly learning and increasing, CAPTCHAs alone are no match to stop advanced bots. To best protect your website, a comprehensive bot management strategy should be implemented and include multiple layers of detection, including behavioral analysis and machine learning.