6 Tips to Choose the Best Bot Protection Platform

Majority of web attacks with a measurable business impact rely on automation via bots. Targeted attacks on startups and large ecommerce websites by cybercriminals have dramatically increased over the past 10 years. From sophisticated fraud to low-level defacement, bot automation drives the headline-grabbing breaches that keep CISOs, CIOs, and CEOs up at night.

Existing technologies such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), IP blocking techniques and CAPTCHA’s do not address the underlying mechanisms used to carry out these automated attacks. Automation makes web attacks hard to detect, disrupt, and defeat using traditional security controls. In such a scenario, it is very important for online businesses to invest in the most accurate bot detection platform.

How to Choose the Best Bot Protection Platform

In order to ensure your website and business has the best protection available against automated bot attacks, it is important to choose the best bot protection platform that doesn’t just rely on IP addresses alone. It should detect and block bots in real-time (without adding a lot of latency), offer very high accuracy and most importantly, is customizable to suit your website needs.

Further, we have listed down 6 evaluation pointers that will help you choose the best bot protection platform for your website.

1. Bot protection platform that detects bots in real-time
2. Your bot protection platform should be built on robust algorithm to provide a comprehensive set of real-time bot detection methods. It should empower you to automate the function to detect and block malicious user requests and allow the same as soon as its behaviour turns good, requiring no manual interference. The solution should continuously update in real-time as the bot landscape evolves.


2. Bot protection platform relying on multiple detection technologies
3. A truly comprehensive bot protection platform should not just offer one or two layers of protection for your website, but employ a wide range of technologies’ IP behavior analysis, user behavior analysis, device behavior analysis, known violators testing, machine learning algorithms and big data powered centralized intelligence.


3. Bot detection platform powered by machine learning algorithm and an on-going fraud intelligence optimization
4. The best bot protection platform should be constantly evolving and investing in R&D to maintain an edge in the "arms race" of website security. Your bot protection platform should have advanced machine learning capabilities that provide an ongoing protection against newer bot patterns, thereby securing your website without adding load on your current security or IT personnel.


4. Bot protection platform that protects website from all types of bots frauds
5. The best bot protection software should protect your website from all types of bot frauds including web scraping, click fraud, bot traffic fraud, form and comment spam, over-crawling frauds, price scraping and any other attacks a bot could deliver.


5. Bot protection platform should provide a detailed analysis of bot traffic
6. An effective bot protection platform should provide a high-level view of various characteristics of a website’s bot traffic, in a rich historical pattern. The solution should also provide in-depth behaviour analysis of every single bot to help customers determine the appropriate actions to be taken against them. This helps you build a better bot management strategy.


6. Bot protection platform with customized bot management strategy
7. Invest in a bot protection platform that allows a variety of bot management techniques - slowing or delaying bot traffic, serving alternate content or identifying bot traffic and blocking it. Your bot manager should allow you to put an extra layer of security control over vulnerable pages like customer sign-up and details pages, lead generation forms and login pages. It should also help you to create customized rules on the go for accurate detection of sophisticated bots.

Your bot management solution should provide you the ability to mitigate the negative impacts of bad bots without compromising the business benefits coming from good bots.