The Problem
On average, more than a third of all Internet traffic is not initiated by real users. Across many industries, the majority of login attempts are fake. Credential abuse attacks, account takeover, and price scraping continue to persist.
Organizations have invested in bot management solutions, so why does stopping bad bots continue to be a problem for them? Because stopping bot attacks requires a different approach than the cat-and-mouse game that’s associated with first-generation offerings.
So, what does better bot management look like? At Kasada, we believe an approach that is both elegantly simple and superiorly effective is the one that will win the war against malicious automation. One that is architecturally designed to overcome two essential and very different drivers that make defending against malicious automation difficult:
- Financial – economics are heavily skewed in favor of the attacker, with huge return potential
- Technical – attackers continue to increase their sophistication to circumvent defenses
Financial – Huge Return Potential
Follow the money – that’s what attackers do. Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 and will be more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.
As an example, consider an account takeover attack on an e-commerce site. Suppose an attacker phishes and purchases a million stolen credit cards for a total cost of $100 in an attempt to fraudulently purchase gift cards. Through an automated attack, the online retailer bears a huge cost – credit card authorization charges, fraudulent gift card purchases, human time, brand damage, and the massive infrastructure resources required to sustain such an attack. Even if only a tiny percentage of credit cards are indeed valid, the attack can be enormously profitable with minimal cost.
Technical – Increasing Sophistication
When there’s money to be made, fraudsters will figure out how to circumvent defenses, which is what’s happening with existing solutions. Online businesses have been forced to add new layers of defenses to stop increasingly sophisticated attacks, adding cost and complexity to security operations.
Most defense techniques rely on using historical data to make decisions about the future. Examples include blocking IP addresses based on history, leveraging rate controls, applying rules based on signatures, and network characterization. Even machine learning searching for anomaly patterns is based on the past in order to apply that learning to the present. To increase efficacy, businesses have been forced to combine a variety of rule-dependent techniques while adding greater complexity within their operations. All the while, attackers are continuing to find new ways to bypass such defenses.
Turning the Paradigm on its Head – Efficacy Without Sacrificing Simplicity
Kasada helps businesses ensure their online traffic integrity by mitigating bot attacks in a way that is elegantly simple and superiorly effective. Unlike legacy bot mitigation and management tools that are rule-dependent, easy-to-detect, and expensive to maintain, Kasada’s ruleless approach finds the immutable evidence associated with malicious automation whenever bots interact with your websites, mobile apps and APIs — and overcomes both the financial and technical issues that have made automated attacks so difficult to defend against.
First, it makes automated attacks financially unviable and slow by hitting the attackers where it hurts – their wallets. A cryptographic proof-of-work challenge able to increase in difficulty is designed to exhaust the compute resources of automated attacks, without informing the attacker while also being invisible to the end user (no need for CAPTCHAs). Inflicting financial damage to attackers destroys their ROI.
Second, it doesn’t rely primarily on data from the past to apply to the present. A unique client-side sensor detection and inspection process, used to profile and validate real browser and human interaction, allows for immediate detection with the ability to stop attacks from the first request. Including those never seen before. This approach results in an extremely low false positive rate of less than 0.001%. Coupled with dynamic, polymorphic obfuscation to deter reverse engineering attempts, immediate and long-term efficacy is realized.
How Kasada works:
Keep it Simple
It is the simplicity of Kasada that allows it to be a holistic solution for ensuring online traffic integrity. Offering time-to-value in less than 30 minutes, with little ongoing maintenance, it allows for seamless protection against bad bots across all web properties, mobile apps, and APIs – while bringing Internet control, safety and customer visibility back to the business across all departments.
Get our Data Sheet, “A Bot Management Checklist: 10 Must-Have Capabilities for Stopping Malicious Automation,” to learn:
- Why every business needs the right bot management solution
- The most important capabilities for beating bad bots
- What other providers aren’t telling you that you should know about
- How Kasada can help win the war on malicious automation
Or, see for yourself. Evaluate better bot management by requesting a demo with Kasada today.
