Bot traffic and automated attacks are on the rise. While much bot traffic comes from good bots, about 30%-35% of traffic comes from malicious bots. In 2022, 47.7% of all internet traffic came from bots, while human traffic fell to its lowest level in eight years at 52.6%.
Online businesses need to take the right steps to block bots and protect their online activities. Bot detection and mitigation are key to catching bots and preventing them from having a negative effect on your business.
If you want to protect your business from automated threats, you need to use the right bot detection tools to ensure even the most sophisticated bots aren’t let through.
Bot detection techniques should be your first line of defense against bad bots, for the following reasons.
1. Clean Up Metrics by Reducing Bot Traffic
Organizations conducting business online need accurate and trustworthy data. Bad bot traffic can severely skew analytics to the point where insights can’t be gleaned from the data. In the best case scenario, leaders are aware of their bot problem and know that they can’t trust their data, forcing them to make decisions without the valuable insights gained from their analytics. In the worst case scenario, leaders are unaware of their bot problem and make crucial and long lasting decisions based on inaccurate data. Either way the presence of bot traffic can greatly hinder businesses’ strategic decision making process.
By stopping bots you can improve your data integrity allowing you to track site performance, success of ad campaigns, conversion rates, page engagement, and customers’ journey. Better data can also help allocate resources properly and make important strategic decisions for your business.
Traditional anti-bot solutions need to let bots into your online channels before it can block them. Detection methods like behavioral analysis or CAPTCHAs need bots to interact with your site before they can determine if the session is a human or a bot. By then bots have already skewed your analytics. Sophisticated bots can also easily bypass these methods, allowing them to move on and conduct their attack.
Kasada detects the presence of automation instead of the behavior of automation. Allowing you to block bots before they can enter your online channels, ensuring that not only are your website, API, and Mobile apps safe, but your data is trustworthy.
2. Avoid Risk to Your Online Applications
Many industries need to pay attention to how advanced bots can have an impact on their activities. Some types of businesses may need to be more careful than others to ensure they know how bots could affect them. The eCommerce industry, in particular, needs to protect their online channels from bad bots.
eCommerce businesses need to collect and store highly valuable customer information, including personal details and credit card information. This makes them excellent targets for credential stuffing and account takeover attacks. Gaining access to users’ accounts allows bad actors to steal information and loyalty points, or make fraudulent purchases. Bots also target payment pages. Attackers use automation to test massive lists of stolen credit card numbers to find the ones that work. Leaving online retailers with a tarnished merchant history, leading to high charges from payment processors on future card authorizations or even a partnership termination with a payment processor if the problem is not addressed. Finally, sneaker or scalper bots allow adversaries to unfairly check out in-demand products. Leaving real customers empty handed, and forcing them to buy the items at a massive markup from the same botters that beat them in the first place. Sneaker bots can create a heavy toll on retailers’ brand reputation and bottom line.
Bot detection helps to prevent these problems for eCommerce businesses and a range of other industries. If you’re selling anything online, preventing malicious bots from causing problems for you and your customers is a must. Kasada uses real-time detection to find and block bot attacks as quickly as possible. You can automate your reaction to bot attacks to ensure you are able to fight back quickly and efficiently. Whether you are already using bot mitigation tools or you need to find the right ones for the first time, Kasada can help you by providing robust protection across your applications.
3. Prevent Monetary Losses from Fraud
The potential monetary losses that can come from fraud are, of course, a major consideration when thinking about the detection and prevention of bad bots. Being able to separate good bots and bad bots helps to prevent the losses that could result from malicious bot activity. The financial loss caused by bots can result from a number of activities that they carry out.
The 2022 State of Bot Mitigation report found that 69% of organizations surveyed lost more than 6% or their revenue due to malicious automation. Bad bots can conduct fraud at scale, allowing them to increase ad spend through click fraud, take over accounts, test stolen credit cards, commit toll fraud and SMS pumping, purchase in-demand products, or abuse human errors by checking out mispriced items.
In addition to the effect bot attacks can have on revenue, side effects of an automated attack can also impact revenue. The surge in traffic during a bot attack can slow down or even crash your online channels, hurting both your revenue and your customer experience. Downtime could cost upwards of $300,000 per hour for enterprise organizations. Of course, every organization is different, and network downtime can affect each of them in different ways. As well as causing downtime, bad bots can cause other issues that lead to financial loss. By disrupting your website and slowing it down, you could lose money in less direct ways. A slow website can cause you to lose traffic and cause a decline in conversion rates.
By 2024, online payment fraud losses are set to exceed $200 billion. Bot mitigation is vital to play a part in preventing this.
4. Protect Your Brand Reputation
It’s not just monetary losses that your business needs to watch out for. Activity from bad bots could also lead to your business’s reputation taking a hit. When your business activities are taking place online, your customers are interacting with you online too. This means that you have to keep them and their personal information safe if you want to ensure your business reputation stays intact.
Not only can problems directly caused by bot attacks affect your reputation, but less direct issues that arise also make a difference. For example, if your IT team is spending more and more time trying to prevent bots from causing problems, they have less time for other issues that require their attention. Your customers may end up frustrated because they are facing various technical issues that are being neglected.
Your customers could come up against problems caused by bots, such as a lack of available inventory for them to order. Research from Forrester showed that 78% of respondents had seen more customer complaints and customer churn due to bot attacks. 65% also said that they had seen greater revenue loss. Some of the most common types of bot attacks included web scraping, card fraud, DDoS, and inventory fraud.
If customers are struggling to use your website due to bot attacks, it affects the reputation of your brand. Customers could find you less trustworthy if they can’t interact with your site properly and it seems as if you can’t keep it secure. Bot detection and mitigation make it easier to stay on top of controlling bot activity so that you can protect the reputation of your brand and ensure you can retain your customers.
5. Improve Your Customer Experience
Customer experience needs to be a focus of any organization conducting its business online. When there’s so much competition to face, you need to provide an excellent experience for your users to ensure they’re satisfied. Bot activity on your website, mobile app, or other applications can have a significant effect on the experience for your customers. In fact, even traffic from good bots can have an impact on the usability of your website, slowing it down so that it’s more difficult for people to use.
Your customer experience could be affected by sneaker bots, which hoard inventory to resell. This means that your genuine customers are unable to get access to the products that they want. Another problem can arise from influence-fraud bots, which can manipulate the data that both companies and customers use to make decisions. False data could cause your customers to make bad decisions about their purchases, and your brand could get the blame.
Bots should be used to improve the customer experience, not disrupt it. But if there is too much activity from bad bots on your website or other applications, it’s likely to have a negative impact on your customer experience. Not only can bots negatively impact your customers’ experience, ineffective anti-bot solutions can also frustrate users. Solutions like CAPTCHAs only annoy real users, as modern bots can easily solve them and in most cases can solve them faster than humans.
Bad bots could cause all sorts of problems for your customers, from breaking into their accounts to stealing data. Bot detection helps to protect them and enhance their experience. Kasada ensures bots are accurately detected, blocked, and deterred from coming back, while remaining invisible to real users, improving your security and customer experience.
6. Stay Ahead of Attackers
Using bot detection tools and mitigation from Kasada, you can stay ahead of attackers so that you can take a proactive approach to keeping your organization secure. Bad bots can cleverly mimic human behavior, which makes it very difficult for many bot detection solutions to pick up on them. But, with the right solution, you can ensure that even these bots that attempt to stay under the radar are detected and can be dealt with appropriately.
IT teams can often feel like they are constantly trying to catch up with new threats. Instead of struggling in this way and always being behind, bot detection will allow you to stay ahead of attackers. Threat intel, bot detection tools, and powerful analytics tools from Kasada make it possible to improve your overall security and always be prepared to deal with any threats from bad bots. You can get started with our tools in just a few minutes, thanks to quick onboarding and immediate time-to-value. Getting set up is simple and delivers a range of essential features straight away.
Bots have evolved, and most solutions struggle to keep up. Instead of putting out fires, the better solution is to identify and stop threats before they can ever be allowed to affect you. Kasada hands off and agile architecture means that you can spend your time in more valuable ways while we stop the automated threats. Kasada can integrate with your existing architecture and enable you to stop having to deal with bots and unnecessary management of your anti-bot solution.. With actionable insights available, you get the data that you need to continually improve the security of your infrastructure.
A bot detection solution that can block bad bots and prevent a potential bot attack is a key element for keeping your applications secure. Bot management solutions that provide this detection is the process toward safeguarding your data. With a robust bot detection solution and mitigation solution, you can detect bots early and stop bots in their tracks both now and in the future. If you’re ready to see Kasada’s bot detection in action, get started today.
