3 Most Critical Things Bot Management Strategies Overlook

As organizations work diligently to protect their operations and customers from cyber threats, they are finding themselves at a critical inflection point. Automated attacks continue to evolve, enabling bad actors to adapt and bypass basic security defenses with little investment. Just as the proliferation of modern and distributed app architectures—which are built on disaggregated microservices, containers, and APIs—has expanded the attack surface area, so has access to low-cost yet highly effective bot and attacker toolkits. Bots and automated attacks directly result in account takeover (ATO), data breaches, credential spills, denial of service, and fraud.

The associated business implications can be disastrous and include loss of customer trust, damaged brand, fines, increased operational expenses, chargebacks, and disruption to customer loyalty programs. However, current (and widely popular) security solutions in the marketplace like CAPTCHA and multi-factor authentication (MFA) are easily defeated by attackers, and often introduce additional friction and challenges for legitimate customers wanting to transact, resulting in cart abandonment and lost revenue.

The stakes could not be higher. As the relative share of commerce and services transactions continue to shift online, the economic value of your customers’ digital accounts to your organization is increasing. In parallel, attackers will continue to develop more creative ways to compromise them, jeopardizing strategic business imperatives and pressuring your top and bottom lines. You need a strong bot management solution to secure your most valuable assets, your applications, and sensitive data from bots, automated attacks, web scrapers, and other exploits. However, most organizations tend to overlook 3 critical things in their bot management strategy:

1.       A bot detection solution must not only be accurate but also adaptable

When it comes to detecting both good and bad bots, accuracy and adaptability should be table stakes. Enterprises that have tried to mitigate bad bots know the financially motivated and well-resourced attackers behind the bots retool within hours to avoid detection; they mimic humans, they randomize keystrokes and mouse movements, and they easily defeat CAPTCHAs and exploit proxy networks with millions of IP address to bypass deny lists. Enterprises also realize that detecting these advanced bots is terribly difficult, that commodity bot products do not work, and that doing it themselves would consume far too many resources. As a result, your bot detection solution needs to accurately react in real time and maintain resilience as attackers retool. By leveraging machine learning and AI to constantly update detection rules, it should adapt your defenses as attacks and attackers evolve. This ensures that automated malicious transactions are blocked while enabling legitimate transactions that keep your organization and customers’ experiences protected.

Our recently commissioned Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study confirms, in our opinion, that customers improve their efficacy and adaptability when using a modern solution. The study finds that customers using the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense solution minimize bot attacks and subsequently, fraud. The study contains insights from several customer interviews conducted by Forrester which we believe highlight the importance of highly adaptable solutions and validate our accuracy and ability to quickly respond as criminals do. Our customers saw a 92% reduced fraudulent account creation and over 80% improved bot blocking. We've also included F5 customer perspective on the need for an accurate and adaptable solution: