TL;DR: Half of all internet traffic is Bots. There are good and bad bots and it is important to be able to manage all bot traffic, mitigating the risk posed by bad bots so you can protect your customers and your business.
Bot management is the practice of knowing how bots impact your business and understanding their intent so you can better manage all bot activity. After all, there are “good” bots and “bad” bots. The “good” bots are the ones we rely on—like bots that search for and find things on the internet or chatbots that drive improved customer experiences. Then there are “bad” bots—ones that hoard resources, perform account takeovers and credential stuffing, launch DDoS attacks, steal intellectual property or impact your business intelligence.
As a reminder, bot threats are often defined as any automated misuse of functionality or action that adversely affects web apps. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind that the bot itself isn’t the true culprit, it’s the bot operator.
Being able to manage all bots effectively will require separating the good from the bad. This is where bot mitigation comes into play—that is, identifying, blocking and mitigating the unwanted or malicious bot traffic that hits your network so you can reduce your risk.
Bot mitigation is far more than just identifying your bot traffic; rather it is about identifying and blocking unwanted bot traffic. Furthermore, bot mitigation boils down to reducing the risk of a bot-related threat.
Majority of threats in any environment start with bots or botnets—they help cybercriminals achieve scale. Every kind of online interaction—website visits, API calls to mobile apps, and others—is being attacked by bots. Equally important, bots are also messing with business intelligence (BI).
These are the Top Business Impacts of Bad Bots:
As bot technology and influencing factors such as machine learning and AI continue to evolve, so will the threats they pose. That’s why it’s critical, when looking at your overall security strategy, that you consider how you will filter out unwanted automated traffic and mitigate malicious bots in general.
Preparing your organization to deal with the impact of bots will help ensure your Intellectual Property, customer data and critical backend services are protected from automated attacks. The best way to mitigate bot threats is to target the attack tool itself and adopt a layered security approach to manage changing attack vectors. While traditional IP intelligence and reputation-based filtering can help here, these technologies need to evolve to keep pace with smarter and smarter bots.
Here’s some steps you can take:
A Bot Protection solution should address technical and business challenges that bots create:
F5 Bot Protection delivers proactive, multi-layered security that blocks and drops bad bot traffic before it can hit your network, mitigating bots that perform account takeovers, vulnerability reconnaissance and denial of service attacks targeted at your network or app layer. Automated threats require automated defenses.
https://www.f5.com/solutions/application-security/bot-management