Online Bots - 5 Pointers You Need To Know

Be it a startup business or a large company, the significance of a robust bot protection strategy in place just acts as a catalyst in building traction and being safe from online fraud. When we talk about online bots that harm web businesses, we also need to understand how bot threat is evolving. Here are 5 essential pointers you should know about online bot trends:

1. Bots are everywhere and they are now a part of our online lives, knowingly or unknowingly
2. If you build it, they will come for sure. Online businesses build websites for different reasons - to sell stuff, to influence others through thought leadership, or just to build stronger relationships with customers. To do these things, companies put unique, well-researched and more differentiated and curated content on their websites. It is impossible to divorce that content from any discussion around bots. That content is, in fact, the reason for bots to attack the websites.
   
   The content we put on our websites has value to more than just our target audience. It has value to an entire ecosystem of individuals and organizations whose motives and goals may or may not be aligned with ours, and who create bots to extract that content and capture that value. Think of your partners who use that content to resell your products, or your competitors who use your pricing information to better compete with you in the market.
   
   Regardless, the point is that you can't make bots go away. They are a fact of our online lives and are, in fact, spawned by the very content we are creating online.


2. Bots are mimicking human behavior
3. Human behavior-mimicking is where bots are heading, and it's a key reason that in-house bot detections tools fail to detect sophisticated bot patterns. Such tools do not have access to the kind of resources that can differentiate between human users from headless browsers and such tools also lack the power of collective fraud intelligence.
   Bots can be programmed to interact directly with web pages, for example, to spam forms or throw password dictionaries at user login fields. This capability makes them significantly more threatening and frustrating to online businesses than basic bots alone. Many of these more intelligent bots are still detectable, however, as they lack essential browser functionality and certain human behavioral patterns. These bots can almost (but not quite) perfectly mimic a human user.
   
   InfiSecure's robust web security platform powered by machine learning technology enables us to predict the behavior of bots running in headless browsers, making it extremely difficult for even the most sophisticated of bots to avoid detection. Other powerful features allow a real-time blacklisting and whitelisting as and when a bot behaviour changes from bad to good or vice-versa.


3. The scale and rate of Bot interaction is increasing at an alarming rate
4. With increasing competition in the online selling landscape, pricing is becoming more dynamic and content is constantly rotated. We believe Bot traffic will follow the same traffic patterns. It is going to evolve at a faster pace to match and exploit websites and brands.
   
   Bad bots that scrape sites for price or content will need to scrape more sites, more quickly to ensure that a company can match its competitor's offers and prices which are changing rapidly. In order to offer the same or similar products at equal or better prices in near real-time, they will have to increase the bad Bot traffic to gather that information.
   Good Bots from search engines, ad tech, SEO crawlers and the likes will also want to keep up with the rapidly changing content and prices to ensure they are showing high in search results with the updated content and capturing accurately, their ad-based traffic.


4. Bot protection strategy depends on business model
5. Everybody agrees Googlebot is "good" and DDoS bots are "bad". Googlebot and DDoS bots are at the two opposite ends of the "good" and "bad" spectrum. But if you move slightly more towards the middle of the spectrum, it would also be no surprise to hear that nobody agrees on anything else. What's "good" for one company may be "bad" for another, and to muddy things even more, some bots can be both "good" and "bad" at the same time.
   
   Take content aggregators. Major hotel chains consider aggregators to be trusted partners that help them book rooms. Airlines, however, incur a financial cost every time someone - human or not - goes through the workflow to book a flight on their site, and the cost attributed to bots can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. But even trusted partners can "misbehave" with high traffic at the wrong times, leading to an uncomfortable tradeoff between business benefit and performance impact.
   
   We at InfiSecure understand that every business is unique and that is the reason that we put the power in the hands of our customers as to how they want to structure their bot management strategy. Because, at the end of the day, another fact of life is that we all want to do what's right for our business; we just need the tools to do so.


5. Businesses need to have a proactive bot protection strategy
6. Another fact of life is, no website security product can guarantee a 100% protection against online fraud. A 0.01 percent chance still remains for fraudsters to find loop holes in a system. Having said this, not deploying a robust web security and bot protection platform makes your website 100% vulnerable to attacks.