What Is Bot Security?

Customer trust is a critical, yet fragile business asset, especially when it comes to bot security and online interactions. When engaged in web-based communication and transactions, your customers and partners want to be sure that they’re interacting with legitimate representatives of your business. At a time when bots account for up to 70% of site traffic, it can be difficult to protect your customers from malicious activity designed to impersonate users, steal data, or create fake accounts, and disrupt business.

Akamai Bot Manager provides the security required to effectively detect bot traffic, mitigating malicious bots while managing the impact of good bots on site performance. With Akamai Bot Manager, you can run automated operations more safely and effectively, increasing customer trust in your entire ecosystem.

When building a bot security program, it’s important to choose a solution that will accomplish three critical objectives.

• Detect and mitigate the most sophisticated bots. The most sophisticated bots use a variety of techniques to subvert detection by mimicking human behavior. Bot operators constantly refine their code when they encounter bot management tools. In response, the best bot security solutions will continually adapt and adopt defenses that block advanced bots, confuse operators, and raise the cost of an attack to the point where operators no longer consider it worth it.
• Invest in continued research and innovation. From image-scraping and NFT-hoarding bots to bots-as-a-service threats, new bot-related threats are constantly emerging. The most effective bot security teams are constantly investigating new tactics and techniques, feeding information and research to product teams to refine bot mitigation strategies.
• Protect all stakeholders impacted by bots. While applications are a primary target of bot network attacks, teams throughout an organization are adversely impacted by threats from bots. A comprehensive bot security solution must address the needs of executive, fraud, marketing, and ecommerce teams, providing insightful reports and metrics to stakeholders in each area. The most effective solutions will integrate easily with the business tools that stakeholders rely on.

When seeking solutions that meet and exceed these criteria, a growing number of global organizations today turn to bot security solutions from Akamai.

Akamai Bot Manager delivers the visibility and control that security teams need to safeguard the business and protect online relationships with customers. Our bot security solution is backed by the strength of Akamai Connected Cloud, the world’s most distributed platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery.

Bot Manager deploys multiple patented technologies to detect both good and bad bots, mitigating malicious bots where they make contact, rather than allowing them to reach your site first. Our detection engines are constantly updated with insights from our threat intelligence researchers, who analyze nearly 946 TB of new attack data daily to stay on top of vulnerabilities and evolving bot threats.

To improve bot security without adding latency to performance, Akamai’s bot management solution uses large volumes of clean traffic data collected from a wide distribution of data types to train Akamai’s machine-learning algorithms and make them more accurate. For each bot request, Bot Manager issues a Bot Score between 0 and 100, reflecting the likelihood a request is coming from a bot (100) vs. a human (0). Cybersecurity teams can establish custom settings to watch or monitor low-score requests while mitigating high-score requests. Requests in the middle range can be challenged with cutting-edge security solutions that slow sophisticated bot attacks and drive up costs for attackers.

With Akamai bot security solutions, you can:

• Build trust with customers by protecting them from fraudulent activity while reducing friction on your sites
• Lessen the burden of remediation by preventing successful attacks, stolen accounts, and other adverse outcomes of bot attacks
• Improve operational control and application security, enhance efficiency, minimize risk, reduce IT spend, and strategically manage partner bots
• Reduce the need for human intervention with autotuning capabilities that learn normal traffic patterns and tune detections to avoid misclassifying requests

The Akamai platform offers several additional security solutions that surround and protect your entire ecosystem from the adverse impact of bots and botnets.

Account takeover protection

Akamai Account Protector stops account takeover attacks and adversarial bot attacks like credential stuffing and inventory manipulation. Utilizing techniques to understand the behavior of legitimate account owners, Account Protector assesses the risk of each authentication request to effectively prevent fraudulent human logins and to mitigate the sophisticated adversarial bots that often precede an attempt to take over an account. This Akamai technology autotunes bot detections to provide security that is uniquely tailored to your business.

Akamai Managed Security Service

With Akamai Managed Security Service dedicated Akamai experts can monitor bot security solutions and provide proactive response recommendations as well as emergency support during security events. This managed service offering enables organizations to improve bot security without adding additional burden to overstretched security teams.