Why enhancing bot protection for web and API endpoints matters

The trouble with bots is that they aren't all bad. Unfortunately, this can make it challenging to detect malicious bots that find their way into your system and threaten your business.

But bots are a fact of life in today's digital world. This means defending your organisation from the bad ones with an effective anti-bot solution is more critical than ever to ensuring continued business success.

Invented to automate human processes, bots are primarily used to increase efficiency by taking care of a range of tasks that free us up to create and implement new business innovations.

The irony is that some bots are created or used by attackers to carry out malicious activities that threaten the wellbeing of your organisation by crashing your website, creating fake accounts, freezing inventory and preventing orders from being fulfilled.

In some cases, this can cause long-term reputational damage, especially if the bots steal customer information or severely impact customer service, as this will drive customers away and stifle your company's success.

In fact, recent research has found that sophisticated bot attacks resulted in 80% of organisations facing a financial loss, with two-thirds acknowledging that a single bot attack has cost them $100,000 or more in the past year; a quarter note that figure is closer to $500,000.

But there are ways to safeguard your organisation from the perils of bad bots.

These include:

1. Monitoring incoming bot traffic and analysing where it has come from

2. Practicing least privilege principles among staff

3. Blocking every bad bot access point

4. Monitoring for failed login attempts

5. Keeping software up to date

Bot management from Indusface's AppTrana combats bad bots through advanced multi-layered protection. With a tailored solution, it provides robust bot management at scale by:

Monitoring bot traffic to detect threats

Spotting bot traffic can be a time-consuming and challenging task when it has to be done manually. AppTrana solves this problem by using advanced multi-layered bot protection combined with behavioural analysis technology to monitor behaviour patterns of past traffic and block bots accordingly, simplifying and automating this process.

Providing immediate protection

AppTrana comes with straightforward onboarding, including pre-configured protection that can be up and running in 2-3 minutes.

Further, its always-on protection means that no bot will ever go undetected, ensuring legitimate traffic can continue smoothly.

Mitigating cloud-based threats

AppTrana makes sure application integrity is maintained by providing you with accurate and fully managed highly-scalable cloud-based protection, ensuring online customer experiences are secure and without any delays.

As well as minimising the risk of botnets, onboarding reduces the processing loads on infrastructure by blocking malicious bot traffic.

Providing a managed bot mitigation solution

AppTrana is the only product on the market that offers a managed bot mitigation solution, where security experts work with customers to understand the requirements of their applications and create sophisticated rules and checks to prevent complex attacks that generally go unprotected when using automated checks.

What sets AppTrana apart

What also separates AppTrana is the techniques it employs to understand the bot landscape, such as fingerprinting, which includes capturing a range of internet properties to uniquely identify and categorise bots. Once this process is complete, different strategies are put in place depending on what is necessary.

In addition, AppTrana uses various self-learning models to track the behaviour of requests as well as abnormalities in usual behaviour to identify and block bad bots immediately.

Establishing a workflow (or normal user behaviour) allows AppTrana to validate this activity and identity bad bots according to its parameters. Bots usually don't follow these workflows and can therefore be easily identified when robust rules written by security experts are implemented.

Ultimately, combining these capabilities will put your organisation in great shape for preventing bot attacks and maintaining efficiency and long-term business success.

In addition, Indusface has published a whitepaper to help you understand the different types of bots, the challenges in managing them, the importance of implementing solutions that mitigate issues with bad bots, and how AppTrana offers enhanced protection against them.

Read more on the whitepaper: Need for Managed Bot Mitigation Solutions