Even good bot traffic can be considered to be noncritical traffic. However, as more content becomes dynamic, it becomes uncacheable from CDNs like Akamai and results in a slower site, which frustrates users. Bot management allows organizations to slow down bots during times of high user traffic, as well as serving cached content to bots instead of live site content.
Bot protection that delivers improved user experience
Akamai Bot Manager effectively detects bot traffic and mitigates malicious bots at the edge, while effectively managing good bots — all without impacting user experience. It protects your apps and assets, regardless of how or where customers choose to interact with you. Akamai Bot Manager enables you to run automated operations more safely and effectively, increasing customer trust in your entire ecosystem. Bot Manager also provides customers with visualization and reporting tools, so customers can see the impact that various types of bots have on their business and infrastructure.
Safeguard your most fragile asset: Customer trust
How Bot Manager Works
Features
- Advanced bot detection using AI models for user behavior analysis, browser fingerprinting, and more
- Intelligence from the cleanest data based on billions of bot requests and logins daily
- Stealthy defenses that go beyond block-and-allow actions that tip-off bots
- Real-time, big-picture reporting of trends, industry insights, and detailed analysis of your bot traffic
- Continuous updates to our known bot directory
- Protection for your entire attack surface using the same advanced bot detections for your mobile apps
Customer Story
Bot Protection Use Cases
Learn how Bot Manager provides a range of advanced actions to help mitigate business challenges from adversarial bots.
Site UX/performance
Inventory hoarding
Marketing analytics
Good bot management
Bot visibility
Site UX/performance
User experience/site performance
Inventory hoarding
Inventory hoarding / gray marketers
Companies creating limited-run products to increase demand and hype around the brand often run into grey marketers, who reserve these products in shopping carts as soon as they are available. Grey marketers try to upsell their purchases in other markets, like eBay. This is a problem encountered by sneaker companies, luxury brands, and consumer electronics manufacturers. However, it’s also an issue for airlines or ticketing companies like Outbox, where bots hold on to seats and then release the poor-quality ones.
Marketing analytics
Marketing analytics
Ecommerce organizations typically analyze the behavior of users visiting their site to determine and adapt to user preferences, and maximize online sales. Traffic from automated bots can skew the data being analyzed and lead to inaccurate analysis, poor understanding of users, and lower sales.
Good bot management
Good bot management
While many bots can be considered “good” and conduct desirable activities, a “good” bot can still act overly aggressive or not be desired at a certain time of day or month. For example, Baidu is a classic example of an aggressive search engine crawler that does not respect customers’ robot.txt file instructing it on how fast it can crawl the site, imposing a high load on the origin and reducing performance for users. Some customers block Baidu to reduce the performance impact.
Bot visibility
Bot visibility
Customers do not have a clear idea of the amount of bot traffic hitting their site or the category of these bots (“good”/“bad”). Today, customers typically behave reactively when they have been alerted of a performance or availability issue and then just deal with the top offenders. They are not equipped with the right detection, analysis, or control tools needed to take a more proactive stance.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
A bot is simply an automated software application and can be employed by its operator for a variety of tasks. As a result, Bot Manager can detect any bot based on signs of automation. Bot Manager helps customers manage specific bot-related use cases, such as data aggregation, inventory grabbing, and more.
While many web app and DDoS attacks are perpetrated by automated bots, bot management and web application firewall solutions are still different solutions that address a variety of challenges with a different set of capabilities. Bot Manager provides a range of advanced actions to help mitigate business challenges from adversarial bots.
The data points collected are reviewed with the Akamai legal team on a regular basis to ensure compliance with various privacy laws around the world, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S. More details on Akamai’s general statement on privacy can be found in the corporate website’s Privacy Trust Center.
The functionalities found in Bot Manager are fully available via APIs, so it can be integrated into your DevSecOps lifecycle.
Bot Manager includes a library of over 1,700 known bots, and you can also create your own category for any bots that you or your partners create. This ensures that the useful bots get through without lowering your defenses against adversarial bots.
Bot Manager integrates the insights generated from Bot Score into SIEM tools for customers who want more integrated security visibility. You can enrich the value of your existing tools with the insights from Bot Manager.
Resources
Live demo with simulated attack: Bot Manager
We’ll walk you through a credential stuffing attack simulation, so you can experience firsthand how Bot Manager:
- Leverages AI to detect suspicious behavior and catch an attack in progress
- Gives you the most accurate and self-tuning assessment of your bot traffic
- Detects low-and-slow attacks even when nothing appears to be wrong
- Provides many nuanced responses so you can stop bots — without tipping off the bad guys
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