Looking back in time, it has never been easier for individuals to query about something from an organisation than it is now, thanks to chatbots that can be found on most websites.
However, “the world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows”.
While good bots, such as search engine crawlers and social network bots, account for only 25% of automated traffic, malicious bots account for 39% of total traffic.
Bad bots can drive away customers, degrade the end-user experience by making the site slow, increase infrastructure expenses, and disrupt services, all of which can have a negative impact on business revenue. Not only that, but breaching confidential data, stealing SEO traffic by scraping content, diverting engineering and IT teams away from essential and time-critical tasks, and harming the company's reputation by impersonating sites or selling proprietary content are all potential outcomes as well.
Furthermore, today's bots have advanced to the point that they can switch methods to avoid detection. They are not blocked by Web Application Firewall (WAF) general rules, rate limiting, or IP reputation databases, necessitating the use of a dedicated bot management solution.
What you should look for
However, in order to make the best decision for you and your business, you must first learn how to analyse bot management solutions and comprehend the differences. We list out the 5 factors you should look into:
API Protection
Regardless of vendor or solution, the more powerful bot detection technologies available today, focus on injecting JavaScript code and evaluating the client response. If you need to expose APIs to enable mobile apps or other third parties, you'll need a solution that can safeguard them just like your web pages. Otherwise, your bots (and their issues) will just transfer to your APIs from your web pages.
Flexibility
Bots exist in various shapes and sizes, and their impact on you is rarely straightforward. You'll need a service that can be deployed in a range of ways to take different actions on different sorts of bots depending on their business and IT impacts on you – giving you maximum flexibility.
Resilient Protection
The mere fact that a bot has been blocked does not imply that it has vanished. It keeps coming back, mutating to avoid detection. Many bot management tools can detect bots, but then lose them once they start mutating. Make sure the solution you choose can adapt and improve over time in order to continuously assist you in solving your issues in the long run.
False Positive
False positives are handled differently by different bot protection solutions. Some programmes will automatically deny every request that is detected as coming from a bot, leaving them blind to false positives. Others use a CAPTCHA as an additional challenge to determine whether a request is human. Therefore, make sure your chose solution solves your bot problem without interfering with your business.
Visibility
Every bot management solution can provide you with high-level information about your bot traffic, but there’s more than that. You need a solution that will provide you with the detailed reporting needed to support your business and speed up your time to insight.
How Cloudflare meets your business needs
Now that you know what to look for in a bot management solution, it's up to you to make your decision. May we suggest Cloudflare's Bot Management solution? It includes all five of the features listed above, as well as a few more.
Bot management with Cloudflare is simple to set up and use. It can accurately identify bots on a massive volume of internationally distributed data using behavioural analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting. With Bot Analytics, Cloudflare provides deep analytics that helps improve security posture by understanding, analysing, and learning from automated traffic in the dashboard.
Cloudflare can also detect and block unwanted bots, preventing some of the most common bot attacks such as credential stuffing, content scraping, content spam, credit card stuffing, and more.
To find out more about Cloudflare’s bot management solution, click here.