Automation is everywhere, especially online, and so are bots. Whether you’ve sought help from your internet service provider or started an ad campaign, chances are you’ve interacted with more than a few. Almost 50% of all internet traffic is reported to be bots as of this year, so it’s likely that you’ll interact with a few more if your internet use keeps up.
Although not all bots are bad, bot traffic can have a substantial impact on your organization. If the bots are malicious, you face security risks, but even the good bots can slow down your applications or website and lead to lost revenue.
The Many Types of Bots
When you think of bots, you probably think of spamming tools gumming up the works on your website. However, not all bots are so transparent. Some bots, in fact, are a positive force in cyberspace.
Bots can be benign, malicious, or neutral (or ambiguous, in some cases). Here is a breakdown of bots you may encounter:
- Good bots: These include googlebot, which crawls the web and is essential to Google’s search engine functionality. Other search engines have similar web crawlers at their disposal. Some other good bots include Facebook crawler, customer service chatbots, and activity monitoring bots.
- Neutral or ambiguous bots: While you might have mixed feelings about large language models (LLMs) and chatbots, they have gained a bit of a foothold in the last few years. Typically, these bots do no particular harm, at least to your organization’s security. Since they aren’t actively attacking you, they are not classified as bad bots, but the jury is still out on whether the LLM-trained chatbot is a net good. That said, if you don’t want LLMs scraping your data to train more chatbots, you need a bot mitigation strategy.
- Bad bots: These are the bots you need to be most worried about. Bad bots are used in DDoS and other cyberattacks, and their goals vary, but they generally are deployed to infiltrate your environment or compromise your organization’s data. Bad bots can be anything from compromised IoT devices to fake social media profiles, and they have no upsides.
Challenges Posed by Bot Traffic
The usual problem with bots is their use as attack modalities on your web app. A poorly secured IoT device in someone’s house can be compromised and used to stage a DDoS attack on your application, which is very difficult to mitigate if you aren’t prepared and very difficult to stop once it has begun.
However, DDoS is not the only attack type you need to watch out for; attackers can use bots for any automated attack, including credential stuffing and password cracking. Attackers may also use bots to systematically test for vulnerabilities, and then they will exploit any weaknesses in your security. Your competitors may employ bots to scrape your proprietary information, and LLMs often scrape unsuspecting organizations’ websites and applications for data that can be used to train AI chatbots.
Even good bots can create problems for your application. Good bots in large enough numbers pose problems for your server, especially as your legitimate audience grows. Between legitimate users and friendly (but overabundant) bots, you may find that your application becomes slow to respond and laggy. This ultimately will affect your revenue as customers are unlikely to consistently return to a sluggish app, and new customers will seek other options.
Too many bots can also impact your marketing strategy. Bots interacting with your application may give you an incorrect impression of which features are most used. If you have a website, bot traffic could influence your impressions, bounce rate, and other metrics. This might not be so bad if it only affected your numbers, but if you’re paying for per-click ads, bots may show up as clicks. That means a large bill for you with low returns.
Managing the Impacts of Bot Traffic
The question, then, is what to do about bots. There are a variety of solutions, but not all of them are equally effective:
- CAPTCHAs. This bot countermeasure can be effective for basic bots, but it does not always stop more sophisticated ones from accessing your application. Additionally, consumers report high levels of frustration with CAPTCHAs (consider how many buses and bicycles you’ve gone through in your lifetime).
- Improve monitoring. You can keep a close eye on things like failed login attempts, failed payment validation, new traffic sources, and sudden traffic increases. This is a lot to do manually, so an automated monitoring tool may be able to help if you choose this route.
- Integrated bot mitigation solutions. One of the most comprehensive options out there, the top bot mitigation solutions include automated monitoring, machine learning and behavioral analysis-informed detection technology, and highly adaptable response capabilities.
Ultimately, any of these solutions can help you reduce the impact of bots on your applications, but the most effective (and easiest for both you and your customers) is a well-rated bot mitigation solution. A fully integrated solution will monitor your traffic and authorized access attempts, prevent bot traffic without blocking legitimate traffic, and alert you to unusual activity.
If the solution you choose leverages machine learning against the bots, it will independently respond and adapt to different attacks, which minimizes the time and labor you and your security team will need to invest over time. You may not be able to get away from bots (and there may be some bots you want to keep around), but an effective mitigation solution will keep the bots under control and will complement your existing security measures.