Organizations can prevent bots and botnets from interfering with systems or impacting the experience of users by deploying a bot management solution. A superior anti-bot solution will permit the activity of good bots while blocking malicious activity and botnet attacks. And it’s important to remember that even good bots need to be managed. A sophisticated bot security solution allows specific techniques like slowing down good bots at times when your site has significant human traffic.
What is a bot and what are the different types?
A bot is a computer program that’s designed to imitate or replace the actions of a human by performing automated or repetitive tasks. Short for “robot,” a bot can carry out tasks with much greater speed and accuracy than a human user. There are many types of bots, performing many kinds of tasks, and bots are an ever-increasing portion of internet traffic.
Bots play a large variety of roles on the internet, and more than half of all web traffic is generated by bots. Some bots are extremely useful — search engine bots, for example, are bots that help search engines understand the content of websites to return more accurate search results. Chatbots provide customers and users with quick answers to questions. Many companies create custom bots to automate internal tasks and partner tasks.
Some bots are “gray” bots — not bad, but annoying in certain instances. These are bots that might be legitimate but noisy. Examples can be APIs from other programs that make calls to your systems very often, or partner bots that ping your site constantly. In many cases, you don’t want to stop these, you just want to slow them down or manage them more effectively to make sure they don’t degrade your site performance and negatively affect your user experience.
The bots to worry about are the bad bots — adversarial, malicious bots used by cybercriminals to perform dangerous and costly attacks like hoarding inventory, stealing data, scraping website content and pricing, launching stolen credentials at a site to see which ones work, or even running distributed denial-of-service attacks. Bad bots are typically part of botnets — a networked group of bots working in concert to perform these attacks at scale.
What is a bot designed to do?
Many bots perform legitimate, useful, or necessary services.
- Search engine bots “crawl” through a website to determine what type of content it contains.
- Web scraping bots read and collect data from websites.
- Chatbots simulate human conversation to provide users with access to customer service, answers to frequently asked questions, or general knowledge.
- Shopping bots search for the best deals available on the web, automating the browsing and checkout processes.
- Monitoring bots keep an eye on the health of a website and issue reports when bugs or volatilities are detected.
What is a malicious or bad bot?
Some bots are used for cyberattacks, botnet attacks, or other illegitimate purposes.
- Credential stuffing bots use password-cracking tools to gain unauthorized access to users’ accounts and steal assets like loyalty points and credit card information.
- Inventory hoarding bots grab high-value, limited-availability goods like sneakers, game consoles, and concert tickets, preventing human users from buying them.
- Spambots search websites to harvest email addresses for use by spammers.
- File-sharing bots observe a user’s search queries and provide bogus links that enable malicious actors to infect a computer with a virus or malware.
- Traffic bots mimic human activity on the web to drive up traffic and increase clicks on a website.
- DDoS or distributed denial-of-service botnets attempt to overwhelm websites by flooding them with requests to take sites offline or hold them hostage until specific demands are met.
- Social media bots create fake accounts on social media platforms to support the ideas or increase the followers of a user or social media account.
- Download bots automatically download software or malware to boost download numbers and artificially help an application rank higher.
Defend against bot attacks with Akamai
Named a Leader in bot management by Forrester Research, Akamai provides anti-bot solutions that detect bots, recognize them as good or bad, then block bots and other threats without compromising system performance.
Akamai Bot Manager, part of our Abuse and Fraud Protection suite of products, provides deep visibility into and control over bot network activity within your system. Bot Manager’s unmatched detection and mitigation functionality make it possible to run automated operations more effectively and safely, increasing trust throughout your ecosystem.
Bot Manager uses multiple patented machine learning technologies for bot detection and mitigation, stopping malicious bot activity and botnet attacks at the point of initial contact rather than allowing them to reach your site first. To understand bot and botnet activity, we rely on an artificial intelligence framework to monitor traffic patterns, traffic types, and traffic volume at the edge, where a user first connects to an application.
Across the network, our technology sees an average of 40 billion bot requests per day. This visibility allows our algorithms to learn more and learn faster as our threat researchers analyze terabytes of new attack data — Akamai’s threat intelligence team analyzes an average of 946 TB daily.
Key capabilities of Akamai Bot Manager include:
- Directories of known bots. Using a continuously updated directory of known bots, Bot Manager automatically responds to existing recognized bot threats.
- Sophisticated bot detections. Bot Manager relies on user behavior analysis, browser fingerprinting, automated browser detection, HTTP anomaly detection, and other data points to accurately detect unknown bots from the first interaction.
- Scoring model. Bot Score evaluates every request and calculates the likelihood — from 0 to 100 — that the request is coming from a bot rather than a human.
- Custom settings. Set your strategic responses differently for each endpoint.
- Auto tuning. Bot Manager learns the normal traffic patterns of a site and automatically tunes detections based on unique patterns, minimizing potentially misclassified requests.
- Response tuning simulator. Bot Score enables you to simulate tuning (before putting it into action) and visualize the impact of changing thresholds.
- Granular reporting period. Real-time and historical reporting provide visibility into big-picture trends and detailed analysis of bot and botnet traffic.
- Managed Security Service. This optional service allows our experts to optimize Bot Manager without burdening your internal team.
Additionally, Akamai offers purpose-built cybersecurity solutions to defend against the largest, most sophisticated automated bot attacks like credential stuffing and inventory hoarding. Bot Manager works in line with our delivery, so you get a single pane of glass to see not just bot attacks but other attacks like DDoS attacks, as well as phishing, malware, ransomware, and attacks that take advantage of application and API vulnerabilities.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
A botnet is a network of computers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and other machines that work together to launch large-scale, automated attacks. Often these botnets include devices that were infected with malware and whose owners don’t even realize they’re being employed this way. Cybercriminals use these infected machines to carry out a coordinated attack on a network or system using command and control software. Botnets and botnet malware are often involved in a variety of attack vectors, including the bad bots above — inventory hoarding, credential stuffing, web scraping, and distributed denial of service, among others.
While they may be deemed malicious, the actions performed by bots are not necessarily illegal. If the activity that a bot performs violates a website’s terms of service, for example, it qualifies as a malicious bot but it may not necessarily be breaking any laws. However, credential stuffing — and the related account takeover — is illegal. Inventory hoarding might be illegal depending on the items being acquired.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai is the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online. Our market-leading security solutions, superior threat intelligence, and global operations team provide defense in depth to safeguard enterprise data and applications everywhere. Akamai’s full-stack cloud computing solutions deliver performance and affordability on the world’s most distributed platform. Global enterprises trust Akamai to provide the industry-leading reliability, scale, and expertise they need to grow their business with confidence.