What Else Can You Do to Defend Against Bots?
Imagine you’re a developer who’s responsible for your company’s mobile and web apps. It’s noon on a Friday and you get a call from Security Operations. There’s a bot attack happening against a critical API endpoint, threatening the confidentiality and availability of your system, and SecOps cannot stop it with the tools they have.
Is your weekend ruined? Is this even your problem? Unless you anticipated this from the start, it very well could be. Threat actors using automated scripts — bots — to abuse web applications are a big problem, but they can be a much bigger problem if your application isn’t developed with them in mind.
Protect now or pay later
Failing to account for bots in your design decisions could mean frequent and significant revenue-impacting events, like outages and periods of poor user experience, along with the sleepless nights, missed personal time, and the additional expenses that are always involved when reacting to an all-hands-on-deck incident.
Build more robust apps to defend against bot attacks
There are proactive steps you can take to avoid finding your organization in such a situation. A new Akamai white paper offers 10 best practices for developers to build apps that will be more robust when attacks come.
Some of the guidelines include:
Caching
Identifying and documenting clients that interact with your app
Making it easy to identify when a sensitive operation takes place
Making it easy to distinguish failed logins from successful logins
Following this guidance will also make anti-bot solutions, like Akamai Bot Manager, more effective and easier to implement in an emergency.
Bad bots may cause healthcare data breaches
Healthcare is particularly vulnerable as an industry. According to TechTarget’s Health IT Security news, 31.7% percent of traffic to healthcare sites originates from bad bots: “These bots may result in healthcare data breaches, scraping of sensitive health information, or account takeovers. What’s more, this data may be sold on the dark web for profit after the fact.”
Save your apps and your weekends
Even for applications that are not protected by Akamai, following these tips will help mitigate the effects of bots, helping to improve the availability of both your application — and your weekend.
