Akamai Announces Advanced Bot Detections, Global Recognition of Entities

Written by

April 20, 2023

Written by

Christine Ross is a Product Marketing Director at Akamai, where she leads go-to-market messaging for the Application Security portfolio, including Account Protector and Bot Manager. Prior to Akamai, she worked with blockchain and security startups on product/market fit and positioning. She also spent many years as an industry analyst helping organizations buy and manage emerging technologies and services.

Defending against abusive and fraudulent behaviors is a dynamic space that requires constant innovation on the part of vendors and companies to stay ahead of determined adversaries.

It’s often said that bot management is a cat-and-mouse game: Bot management vendors create bot detections and mitigations … the bot operators find ways to evade and work around those protections … the vendors address these novel attacks by developing new detections and mitigations … and the cycle starts over again.

Follow the money

There’s a simple reason for this cat-and-mouse game: There’s money to be made by the attackers who succeed in getting through to their desired target sites. And many of the more sophisticated attacks are actually a combination of automation and human interaction. From human criminals taking over customer accounts to drain them of value to bot operators hoarding inventory of high-value goods in order to resell them at increased prices — the rewards are high for attackers who succeed.

Defending against abusive and fraudulent behaviors is a dynamic space that requires constant innovation on the part of vendors and companies to stay ahead of determined adversaries.

Enhanced abuse and fraud protection solutions

That’s why Akamai continues to invest so heavily in our abuse and fraud protection solutions. We protect the most well-loved, highly targeted brands in the world. And that means we see the most sophisticated novel attacks, which we can then turn into the most leading-edge protections.

In fact, we’re announcing enhancements today that represent highly advanced artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) models, and other techniques to anticipate and defend against novel attacks, including:

Global recognition of trusted users: Akamai customers benefit from a network effect, using the visibility gained across Akamai’s entire network to feed its risk score for a user login. This capability looks at an entity’s accumulating history across all Akamai Account Protector customers to identify trust indicators and an accurate risk score for every user login, even if that user is visiting a particular site for the first time.

Per-customer machine learning: Building on Akamai’s robust AI and ML techniques, we’re now providing the capability for customer-specific models. These deep learning models study the most sophisticated attacks that we see on highly targeted, big-brand websites. The model then casts the learning into advanced algorithms to implement mitigations against novel attacks in minutes compared with the days and weeks it takes other methods.

Enhanced scraper detection: There has been tremendous innovation among bot operators in scraper bots. Although these bots traditionally have been less sophisticated, the COVID-19 pandemic and other supply chain shocks have made it financially attractive to scrape sites for pricing, product availability, and other information. Hence, scrapers have become significantly more sophisticated and Akamai is enhancing its protections in this space with advanced detections.

Browser impersonation detection: Bot operators often try to impersonate certain browsers in order to evade detection. We’ve created our browser impersonation detection to be highly accurate without requiring regular tuning, so customers see fewer false negatives than with other detection methods.

Signaling for marketing analytics: In addition to abusive behaviors and active attacks like inventory hoarding and credential stuffing, bot traffic can skew marketing data such as what pages are being visited most often. We’ve now enhanced our signaling for marketing analytics so marketers can exclude bot traffic when reviewing site metrics and make decisions that are based on human user preferences to enhance experiences.

Keep your protection current

It’s important for organizations to keep their bot management strategy current. There’s always incentive for bot operators to continue to attack and evade detection, which in turn requires security teams to ensure they’re using the latest capabilities in the fight against bots and abusive behaviors by human attackers.

Akamai’s latest enhancements add to the already robust capabilities of our solutions, which have been recognized by customers and market analysts for their efficacy and protections.