Stop Motivated Fraudsters In Their Tracks
When we talk about bot management and bot mitigation, we’re not talking about just dealing with automation. We’re really describing how to fight the people behind the bots. Just as a physical bank robber relies on a weapon, a bag, a mask, and a getaway car, a digital fraudster also relies on tools; in this case, data, scripts, and/or pre-built ecosystems.
Bot mitigation providers claim to help with web scraping and account fraud, but very few do it well enough to disrupt serious sophisticated fraudsters. That’s because the ability of a bot mitigation solution to sustain its defense, under-motivated resistance, is the true differentiating aspect in this market. Motivated fraudsters will persist in their attempts to evade detection.
Assessing the Bot Mitigation Market: 5 Key Best Practices
When assessing bot mitigation solutions, we have to understand the sophistication of automated malware and fraud ecosystems on the market today and how sustainable each defensive model is. How challenging is it for a fraudster to reverse-engineer the solution and how does the solution respond in a battle?
To help truly understand the differences between the various solutions in the market, you’ll want to apply these best practices:
- The client-side inspection process. What is it? How does it function? Is it static or dynamic? How does it respond to retooling?
- The defensive obfuscation methods used at each layer of the solution.
- The data collection and processing strategy, how it is leveraged, and how it is useful?
- What happens when you identify a bot? What are your bot mitigation options?
- How a fraudster would get around the solution? If you don’t know how to do this, find someone that does.
Focusing on these five areas will help you determine how “fit for purpose” a bot mitigation solution is for your organization and security needs.
Defending Against Automated Attacks: The Rules of Bot Fight Club
To dive a bit deeper, let’s describe an automated attack in the bot fight club, which is a highly adversarial game. As with all games, there are rules.
- This is a battle of intelligence, strategy, and endurance.
- It’s also a game of evasion versus detection.
- The winner is one who can stay in the game the longest.
- The defender’s toolkit includes sensor detection and data analysis.
- The defender is only limited by its agility, ability, and creativity.
- The defender’s actions cannot adversely impact any innocent bystanders.
- The attacker can use any toolkit they like; however, they must operate in the same context as the innocent bystander.
- The attacker must allow access to and respond to all the defender’s challenges.
- The attackers can do anything to blend into the crowd.
How Fraudsters Approach Attacks
Let’s now look at the opponents. In one corner is the fraudster. A fraudster’s strategy is centered around automating for efficiency, impersonation/invisibility, and tactical evasion. Automated attack tactics include:
- Hiding in plain sight: automatically adapting, randomizing, distributing, and rotating the attack process.
- Offensive actions: reverse engineering and evading the end-to-end defensive model — a classic example of the OODA loop.
- Spreading the attack: simultaneously attacking multiple organizations.
How Defenders Stop Attacks
In the other corner is the defender. An organization’s defense strategy is centered around being difficult and expensive to attack. To defend against automated attacks, an organization should:
- Expose automation toolsets via intelligent sensor collection.
- Resist adversarial reverse engineering efforts.
- Develop sophisticated data processing techniques.
- Remove the feedback loops provided to the attacker.
These concepts may seem simple enough, but they are actually quite difficult to achieve. But Kasada has been working on this challenge for years now, and it’s truly what differentiates us from the rest of the marketplace. Only Kasada offers this unique approach to detect and disrupt bot operators.
If you’re ready to see the Kasada difference in action and truly defend against bot attacks with an elegantly simple and superiorly effective approach to bot mitigation, request a demo.