Bot Detection – How to Detect Bots on Your Website, Apps, & APIs

The term “bot detection” denotes the identification of bad bot traffic in APIs, web pages, or apps for smartphones. Thanks to this measure, you can tell genuine human customers from undesirable automated solutions. Bot detection is becoming increasingly trickier because nefarious actors keep inventing sophisticated techniques. They learn how to bypass conventional control arrangements and achieve their goals – for instance, stealing your money or your clients’ contacts.

As a result of bot attacks, organizations incur financial and reputational losses. Their growth and development slow down. In our text, we’ll inform you about the methods of advanced bot detection that will let you avoid unpleasant consequences. You’ll get to know about the potential of our BotBye! tool and find out about the other methods that are considered outdated.

Essence of Bot Detection

Bot detection enables you to identify all varieties of automated solutions that crawl your web pages, APIs, and apps. The results can be distributed by two categories:

• Regular website bot traffic. This category includes the crawlers of search engines, social networks, and various helpful services. There is nothing hazardous about them. They have some drawbacks but don’t involve major risks.
• Bad bot traffic. It consists of automated solutions that come for nefarious purposes – such as stealing your leads or content. It’s crucial to protect against them before they can do any harm to you.

With the regular category, the situation is a bit ambiguous. For instance, SEO services send their crawlers to millions of pages for analytical purposes. Any tool that visits your website takes some part of your bandwidth. The less bandwidth you have, the slower your pages react to the requests of genuine customers. To save more bandwidth for well-intentioned people, you can keep all the SEO crawlers out – except for those that belong to the SEO service that you use. It will be easy to do so with the help of a bot detection solution.

Significance of Bot Detection

By conservative estimates, bad bot traffic accounts for over 30% of the total number of web page visits. Other researchers state it can exceed 50%. Given these numbers, bot detection is vital for confronting various types of cybersecurity threats.

Advanced bot detection tools can help you achieve the following goals:

• Cut down the expenses on maintaining your IT infrastructure. We already mentioned the bandwidth. Besides, without bad bot traffic, you’ll be paying less to CDN providers as well as for your server and API.
• Meet the requirements of the regulatory structures and bodies. Organizations that fail to put enough effort into preventing bot attacks can face huge fines. The details depend on the local legislation of the territory where you company is registered as well as on the laws of the countries that you cater to.
• Excel in competition. Unscrupulous competitors can orchestrate bot attacks to steal your product descriptions, prices, consumer contacts, and so on. If you learn how to ward them off, all your intellectual property will remain with you. Most likely, you paid a fair price to the designers, copywriters, and other professionals who helped you create it. It would be unfair if someone uses it at no cost. Besides, search engines pessimize sites with plagiarized content — so both you and the thief can suffer.
• Enhance customer experience. Because of too intense traffic, your web pages can work slower for human users. In the worst case, your services can become temporarily unavailable. Bot detection will help you avoid traffic overload. Your pages and services will function as intended.
• Let your staff members focus on the highest-priority tasks. Multiple departments of your company might need to work hard to overcome the consequences of bot attacks. For example, your sales representatives might need to review their tactics to convince the consumers to trust you again. Your IT team might need to elaborate a new strategy to combat bad bot traffic. That will distract them from their primary duties. In the mid-term, you may start lagging behind your competitors.

Bot detection is crucial for companies of any size and niche. It allows them to function smoothly, cater well to their audience, and develop rapidly. Eventually, they get more income and maintain their position of a leader in their niche.

Bot Traffic Symptoms

Here are the symptoms that can hint at suspicious bot traffic:

• Traffic peaks from the locations that you don’t cater to. Imagine that your business operates exclusively in the EU – but suddenly, you get thousands of visitors from Latin America. Most likely, that’s bot traffic.
• Too long page sessions. Here are two examples of standard human behavior. In the first case, a person opens a page, realizes it’s not what they’re looking for, and leaves it. In the second case, the person opens the page and spends a few minutes on it to achieve their goal – such as choosing a product and placing an order. In the case of bad bot traffic, automated solutions can stay on the page for much longer than a person. During this period, they can illegally collect information or try to hack accounts.
• Too high bounce rate. Extremely short sessions that last for a few milliseconds are suspicious too and can hint at bot traffic as well. Each automated “visitor” has its specific goal. To reach some goals, it’s enough to spend less than a second on the web page.
• Too many pageviews. If your analytical software shows that users are checking your web pages at an extremely high speed, it can be a symptom of website bot traffic.
• Junk conversions. A conversion can be classified as junk if many users (actually, bots) add products to their carts but fail to finalize the purchase. Alternatively, you may send out your free newsletter and its bounceback rate can be unusually high. These are only two examples of symptoms that hint at bot attacks falling into this category. They create workload for your web pages but you don’t generate any income on them.

After you deploy a bot detection product, you won’t have to monitor any of these symptoms manually. The profile software will promptly identify the above-mentioned issues and will either take measures proactively – or inform you about them and let you make decisions.

Some might say that a conventional analytical system of a website can notice all these behavior abnormalities. But can it take action against bots? No, it can’t. Compared to profile anti-bots tools, a regular analytical dashboard is much less precise and efficient. If you review its statistics, you’ll most probably notice the above-listed symptoms. Maybe, you’ll be surprised by their scale and frequency. You’ll see it’s high time to deploy a dedicated anti-bot product, such as our BotBye!.

Tools to Diagnose Website Bot Attacks

As said above, automated solutions used for bot traffic are growing increasingly sophisticated. Each year, it’s trickier to diagnose website bot attacks. Below, we’ll list the methods that used to be efficient years ago but hardly suit this purpose anymore.

CAPTCHAs

In the late 1990s, this trick was invented to prevent bot attacks on forums and search engines. Today, after a quarter of the century, CAPTCHAs usually fail to diagnose website bot attacks and prevent them. Here are the reasons why:

• CAPTCHAs can undermine data privacy compliance and accessibility.
• CAPTCHAs are not connected into a network. Each one operates separately. They don’t allow you to gather statistics about abnormal behavior that could be a sign of bot traffic.
• The APIs of many automated tools are connected to CAPTCHA farms. It’s a collective of human workers from a developing country who manually solve CAPTCHAs and get paid for that. Their remuneration is ridiculously small by the standards of developed states, that’s why bot creators actively use their assistance.
• Modern bots can efficiently cope with simple CAPTCHAs. Every year, the new generations of automated tools are becoming smarter.
• This outdated instrument is detrimental to user experience. People don’t want to make extra clicks or get distracted by irritating small tasks. They want their customer journey to be as smooth as possible. Some individuals might leave your web page because they don’t want to solve a CAPTCHA. Others might try to do it – and if they fail, they might get frustrated and leave. Such failures, known as false positives, are not too uncommon. They take place when website owners employ difficult CAPTCHAs that bots can’t solve. People often complain about such cases on social networks, which can be bad for your brand’s reputation.

CAPTCHAs can remain relevant if you pair them with an advanced bot detection tool. Keep on reading and you’ll find out what we mean to say by using the adjective “advanced”.

Web Application Firewalls

Web application firewalls are hardly suitable for bot detection for two reasons:

• They are IP-oriented. When assessing whether a user can be a malicious actor, a WAF relies on the reputation of their IP address. To bypass it, hackers attach their bots to the IP addresses of private and law-obedient users. WAFs don’t regard such addresses as a potential threat. Plus, bots use the same IP address for one or two times only — and then, switch to the next one.
• WAFs poorly adapt to new and unusual threats. They memorize a set of rules and apply them to identify attackers. However, bot operators are extremely resourceful and regularly come up with innovative methods and instruments. They can conduct hundreds of successful attacks until the WAFs learn the new patterns.

WAFs can detect the simplest bots and ward off some part of the attack. But you shouldn’t expect too much of them.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Unlike the two previous options, it’s not a tool that a business can introduce on its web pages. It’s an option that you can offer to your audience. Preferably, you should avoid making it mandatory because this might turn off too many consumers.

Here is the right way of introducing MFA. You can recommend your new users to enable multi-factor authentication when they sign up. For instance, they can receive a confirmation code in their email when they try to log in. Some people will accept this step. Others won’t because MFA adds friction to the process of signing in.

Please avoid outdated MFA channels, such as SMS. For an experienced hacker, it’s not a big deal to intercept an SMS that you send to your client.

Multi-factor authentication can’t be called an advanced bot detection tool. But at least, it can prevent account takeovers and credential cracking. Unfortunately, it’s useless against other types of bot attacks, such as DDoS or scalping.

Bot Detection Challenges

Detecting bots today is a labor- and time-consuming task. Here are the key reasons why:

• Previously, web pages were the only target for bot attacks. Today, malicious individuals try to hack all the possible endpoints, such as APIs, web and mobile apps, and servers. They attack sign-in forms, payment forms, classified ads, prices, and all the other spots from where they can steal valuable data. It’s necessary to protect all of them.
• Bot traffic can arrive from any part of the globe. Bot attacks can last for several days or weeks in a row. It’s rather cheap and easy to organize them. But you as a potential victim might need to put a lot of effort to withstand them.
• IP-based bot detection is not relevant anymore. Modern attackers juggle multiple APIs and disguise their whereabouts. They can pretend to be browsers of well-intentioned users with an impeccable reputation.
• Automated tools mimic the behavior of organic users. It gets too hard to tell the former from the latter. Above we said that bots can stay on a page for a too short or a too long time, which is suspicious. However, if needed, a hacker can train their botnet to copy the patterns of human clicking and scrolling.
• BaaS have become commonplace. This acronym stands for “bots as a service”. Anyone can leverage a ready-to-use botnet to organize an attack on any target they fancy. It won’t cost them a fortune because they will pay only for the successful results and not all the attempts in a row. After the attack, another user can rent the same botnet for their purposes.

The combination of these factors means that it’s close to impossible to diagnose website bot presence without a profile shield of the latest generation. Your good old analytical system lacks the required functionality for this mission.

Criteria of an Advanced Bot Detection Bot

Here are the boxes that a genuinely advanced bot detection bot should tick:

• Was built by a skilled and experienced team. Its creators should continuously research hacker forums and many other sources of information to get to know about new threats earlier than others. They should keep systematically improving their product. The shield should know how to protect you from an innovative threat before it materializes.
• Leverages machine-learning technology. It enables a bot detection solution to stay relevant for many years. ML allows the product to analyze large bulks of data and keep improving continuously. Thanks to such an approach, a bot detection bot can recognize even the newest and the most unusual threats.
• Analyzes the signals that come from both the server side and the client side. The most primitive bots tend to arrive from the former – and their more sophisticated counterparts from the latter.
• Gathers data in real time. If it does so at regular intervals, modern bot attacks may pass unnoticed. Traffic spikes can be hidden in intervals when the bot detection tool is not active. 100% of requests across all the endpoints should be analyzed.
• Allows you to compose a white list of bots and a black one. The first one is always welcomed – it consists of Google crawlers and other representatives of good bot traffic. The automated tools from the black list can pretend to belong to the white one – but your bot detection shield should be capable of recognizing fraud.

We are proud to say that our BotBye! meets all the criteria of a genuinely advanced bot detection tool. It’s powerful and at the same time extremely easy to use. You can deploy it on your already existing infrastructure, regardless of which technological stack you rely on. You’ll be able to choose between two product versions: on-premise or cloud. You’ll appreciate quick installation and extensive documentation.

BotBye! will protect you from all types of threats that website bot traffic can provoke. These include fake account creation, credential stuffing and credential cracking, scraping, and account takeover – feel free to check informative articles about them on our website!

Our solution will ward off bots from all your products and endpoints. It will generate insightful reports for you and it will be easy for your team to control your traffic. The performance of your web pages, APIs, and mobile apps will be top-notch. No one will be able to steal the information or money that belongs to you or your clients.

Don’t hesitate to sign up for BotBye! Our product can prevent bad bot traffic for companies of any size and from any sector.

To Wrap It Up

Bot detection is vital for any organization that strives to protect its money, data, and reputation. Every day, hackers use bots to attack companies from all over the world. Even if they don’t succeed, they can provoke traffic spikes, increase downtime of sites and apps, and impair their performance. The user experience deteriorates and consumers can switch from the organization to its competitors.

The malicious actors are inventive and it’s becoming increasingly challenging to confront them. Conventional tools that used to be relevant years ago fail to provide sufficient protection against modern threats. To prevent damage, it’s necessary to install a solution that was specifically designed against bots – such as our BotBye!. It will protect your products across all endpoints. It is extremely user-friendly and will quickly adapt to unusual types of threats.

Consider signing up for BotBye! right now! If you have questions, our support crew will be glad to consult you.

FAQs

How to diagnose website bot presence?

Here are the symptoms that can let you diagnose website bot presence: traffic spikes from the locations that you don’t cater to, too long page sessions, too high bounce rate, too many pageviews, and junk conversions. To discover all of them, you can rely on your conventional analytical software. However, such software can’t take measures against the attackers. Besides, it can’t be as precise and efficient as a solution that was purposefully built to confront bots. Consider deploying our BotBye! tool! It was designed to prevent all types of cybersecurity threats connected with bot usage.

Why shouldn’t any business neglect bot detection?

Undesirable website bot traffic can provoke various unpleasant consequences. Your competitors can steal your product descriptions, client contacts, prices, and so on. Your reputation might get tarnished. Your staff members might have to invest a lot of time and effort in fixing the consequences of the attacks. The growth and development of your business can slow down. It’s cheaper and easier to prevent website bot traffic by deploying a powerful dedicated solution. Our BotBye! can serve as a worthy example.

How to select an advanced bot detection solution?

A genuinely worthy solution was built by a skilled and experienced team. It employs machine-learning technology and gathers data in real time. It analyzes the signals that come from both the server side and the client side. It allows you to compose a white list of bots and a black one. Our BotBye! perfectly meets the criteria of a powerful and efficient solution. It prevents API, mobile app, and website bot traffic across all endpoints. It’s easy to install and it will be compatible with your already existing tech infrastructure.