What to look for in a Bot Management Solution

You can use this guide to better understand what features and capabilities you should look for when considering a bot management solution. 

What is bot management?

Bot management is a type of layer-7 security software that organizations can implement to protect their applications from malicious bot traffic. The software offers detection, mitigation, and monitoring capabilities that organizations use to protect their digital assets and maintain a secure online environment.

Bot management protects applications from malicious bots while intelligently distinguishing and enabling legitimate ones. Through its detection, mitigation, and monitoring capabilities, organizations can maintain a secure environment and gain insights into their application’s traffic.

How to Detect Bots

Bot detection is the process of identifying and differentiating between bots and human users on a website, while also differentiating between the legitimate and malicious activity occurring from the identified bot traffic. It is the most challenging function of any bot management software because sophisticated bots are often capable of disguising themselves as human traffic. To detect bots, bot management software can use a number of detection methods outlined below.

What bot detection methods are there?

Bot management software uses a variety of detection methods that may also differentiate between legitimate and malicious traffic. Detection methods are used in conjunction to avoid security gaps that may arise if used individually:

CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a widely used bot detection method that presents challenges to users to prove they’re human. It typically requires users to complete tasks like recognizing distorted characters, solving puzzles, or selecting specific images. Simplistic bots struggle to pass these tests accurately, while humans can easily complete them. The introduction of AI means that many bots are now able to solve CAPTCHAs. 

Behavioral Analysis

This method analyzes user behavior patterns to distinguish between human users and bots. It looks for unusual or suspicious activities that bots tend to exhibit, such as rapid page requests, uniform browsing patterns, or unusual click patterns. Behavioral analysis can also involve factors like session duration, mouse movements, typing speed, navigation patterns, and more.

IP Analysis 

IP analysis involves tracking and analyzing the IP addresses associated with incoming requests. It helps identify suspicious IP addresses or ranges that are known for malicious activities or exhibit bot-like behavior. IP reputation databases or blacklists are often used to flag or block requests originating from suspicious IPs.

User-Agent Analysis

User-Agent analysis examines the user-agent string included in the HTTP request header to determine the client software or device used to access the website or application. Bot traffic may have unique or identifiable user-agent patterns, allowing detection systems to flag requests from known bot user-agents or identify abnormal or suspicious user-agents.

Machine Learning and AI-based Approaches

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be employed to train models that can recognize patterns and characteristics associated with bots. These models can learn from large volumes of data and can detect anomalies or bot-like behaviors from combinations of request headers, user interactions, mouse movements, or navigation patterns.

Device Fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting involves collecting and analyzing device-specific information, such as browser attributes, operating system details, screen resolution, installed plugins, or timezone settings. These device-specific attributes can help identify suspicious or unique device configurations associated with bots.

JavaScript Challenges

JavaScript challenges present an additional task or check that requires the execution of JavaScript code on the client-side. Bots may struggle to interpret and execute JavaScript accurately, while most modern web browsers can handle JavaScript tasks without issues.

A sophisticated bot may be capable of passing one or a few of these detection methods, but by combining them as part of an organization’s overarching bot management strategy, organizations can detect the vast majority of malicious bot traffic on their applications.

How can you mitigate bots?

Once a bot is detected, the focus shifts to mitigation. Mitigation is the process of filtering malicious bots from normal traffic to avoid their potential attacks. This can mean outright blocking the IP that the bots are coming from, or sending their traffic to another part of the application to avoid instances where a false positive prevents a sale or desired action. 

Most bot management products also allow for nuanced rulesets to be applied to bot traffic, including rate-limiting and combinations of rules being met before blocking. This allows organizations to increase decision confidence and ensure that legitimate traffic isn’t impacted by a blocking decision.

What is bot monitoring?

Monitoring refers to the bot management’s observability tools that give insights into bots on your application. It gives holistic views into bot traffic, trends, types and other details that AppSec teams can use to better understand their traffic. 

This is often where broad security strokes can be taken, such as bot block/allow lists and bot policies too. 

What should you look for when selecting a bot management solution?

1. Comprehensive Detection Capabilities

Foundational to any good bot mitigation solution is its ability to accurately detect malicious traffic without disrupting legitimate users. Look for solutions that offer:

• Behavioral analysis: Ability to detect bots by analyzing user interactions like mouse movements, typing cadence, and navigation paths.

• Device and fingerprinting technology: Ability to identify anomalies by examining device characteristics, IP addresses, and session patterns.

• Machine learning models: Ability to adapt to new attack patterns in real-time and reduce reliance on static rules.

• Challenge mechanisms: Ability to deploy non-intrusive CAPTCHAs or JavaScript challenges that weed out bots while maintaining a frictionless experience for real users.

2. Real-Time Threat Intelligence

Bots evolve quickly, and mitigation tools need to be proactive, not reactive. An effective solution should include:

• Global threat intelligence feeds to identify known bad IPs and attack signatures.

• Real-time updates to defend against emerging botnets and zero-day attack techniques.

• Shared intelligence across networks, leveraging data from multiple industries to improve detection accuracy.

3. Low Latency and High Performance

Your bot protection solution should not slow down your website or applications. To maintain performance:

• Ensure the provider offers edge-based or CDN-integrated deployment to mitigate bots closer to the source.

• Look for sub-millisecond latency to protect traffic without degrading user experience.

• Confirm scalability to handle traffic surges during high-demand periods, like product launches or seasonal sales.

4. Granular Control and Reporting

Bot mitigation isn’t just about blocking traffic; you need to be able to understand your traffic. Choose a platform that gives you:

• Detailed analytics dashboards showing attack trends, traffic sources, and bot behaviors.

• Customizable rules and policies to tailor defenses to your business needs.

• Actionable insights for security teams, enabling them to adjust responses and minimize false positives.

5. Seamless Integration with existing infrastructure

The best bot mitigation solution should fit easily into your existing workflow and tech stack. It should offer: 

• Support for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

• An API-first design for integration with WAFs, CDNs, SIEMs, and other security tools.

• Minimal development overhead for deployment and ongoing management.

6. Cost Efficiency and Flexible Pricing

Not all bot traffic is malicious - you can check out our recent report for stats. Some bots (like search engine crawlers) are essential. Your solution should:

• Allow differentiation between good and bad bots.

• Provide tiered pricing models based on traffic or features, so you only pay for what you need.

• Offer ROI-focused reporting so you can quantify the savings from reduced fraud and improved performance.

7. Compliance and Data Privacy

Bot mitigation often involves inspecting user data. Ensure your solution:

• Complies with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.

• Offers data anonymization and secure processing practices.

• Provides clear documentation on data handling for audits and compliance checks.

How Fastly can help

Fastly offers a best-in-class automated approach to bot management. 

Websites attract both good and bad bots, requiring site owners to stay updated on bot behavior with advanced detection tools that analyze traffic patterns. Effectively managing these automated programs ensures a smooth experience for human visitors while maintaining site integrity. Regularly updating protections helps owners stay in control of this wild digital frontier.

Fastly's Bot Management Solution blocks bad bots but allows good ones, like search engine crawlers, to operate freely. This powerful tool keeps your website safe and offers several benefits and features, including: 

• Accurate traffic classification: The system identifies and blocks harmful bots at the edge, allowing good ones to pass. 

• Reduced infrastructure load: By filtering out unwanted traffic, your site runs faster and more economically. 

• Improved website performance: Fastly's software manages traffic precisely, so your site has low latency and consistent performance. 

• Fraud and abuse prevention: With anti-bot policies in place, users feel safe, and trust in your site increases. 

• Customizable mitigation rules: Fastly allows you to make unique rules about managing traffic on your site. Having fine-grained control over your security is invaluable when necessary. 

• Instant traffic insights: The system provides live analysis that helps you make accurate decisions.

• Integrated application security: Fastly combines bot management with other advanced protective measures, like the Next-Gen WAF, to comprehensively safeguard all your apps.

• SEO optimization: By allowing SEO bots to operate freely, the system ensures your site earns a good ranking. 

Do you want to keep your platform safe from bot threats but accessible to users and search engines? Request a demo today to see how Fastly provides complete, customized bot management.