Anti-bot technology is designed to detect and mitigate suspicious or malicious bots, preventing them from reaching an organization’s websites or IT ecosystem. Anti-bot solutions use detection engines informed by threat intelligence to recognize bot activity, allowing traffic from good bots while mitigating malicious bots.
Safeguard trust with anti-bot solutions
Bots are an integral part of online business today, comprising as much as 70% of traffic on websites. Many companies implement bot technologies to improve productivity and efficiency, performing useful and repetitive tasks that would otherwise require human intervention.
However, some bots engage in malicious or illegal activity such as sending spam, buying tickets for scalpers, or scanning for software vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit. Knowing the difference between good bots and bad bots is essential to protecting your IT assets while providing exceptional user experiences and maintaining the trust of your customers.
The right anti-bot system can help. By detecting and mitigating malicious bots while allowing legitimate bot traffic to flow unhindered, Akamai Bot Manager delivers an anti-bot solution that enables automated operations to run more effectively and safely.
Why anti-bot technology is essential
Bots fall into two basic categories: helpful or harmless bots, and malicious or suspicious bots.
A great deal of bot activity on the internet is performed by good bots. Chatbots, for instance, perform ecommerce functions and offer self-service options that engage users. Monitoring bots perform useful tasks like blocking the sensitive data on a credit card that’s been reported stolen. Search engine bots index the content on websites for search engines such as Google or Bing.
Bad bots are deployed for a wide range of malicious purposes:
- Social media bots artificially drive up the number of followers, views, or likes on a social media site for financial gain or influence.
- Download bots automatically download software or mobile applications to boost download statistics.
- Inventory hoarding or ticketing bots buy and resell large amounts of tickets at a profit, robbing legitimate users of affordable access.
- Spambots collect email addresses from websites that can be used to send spam messages.
- Threat actors also use bots to scan systems for known vulnerabilities that they can exploit with a direct attack.
- As part of a large bot network, or botnet, bots can carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that render websites and servers unavailable to legitimate users.
Clearly, anti-bot technology is essential to stopping malicious activity and protecting the organization from a broad array of threats. Yet any anti-bot solution must also recognize and permit good bots to carry out the vital workflow activities that help companies compete. That’s where Akamai can help.
Akamai Bot Manager
Akamai Bot Manager stops the most dangerous, evasive bots and botnet traffic before they erode customer trust — while letting good bots carry out essential tasks. Deploying unmatched detection and mitigation capabilities, Akamai’s anti-bot technology stops bad bots where they make initial contact, rather than allowing them to reach a website first. Akamai’s detection engines are continually updated with the latest intelligence from our threat research team, ensuring a higher level of accuracy in recognition and bot mitigation.
Bot Manager deploys anti-bot protection wherever end users interact with your IT ecosystem — on endpoints via the web, on native mobile apps, or on APIs. Our cybersecurity technology even covers requests that cross from one domain to another, ensuring that companies with multiple brands or businesses do not suffer from protection gaps.
Akamai anti-bot technology uses a Bot Score that assesses the likelihood a request is coming from a bot vs. a human being. High scores — requests that are definitely bot-driven — can be quickly mitigated, while low-scoring requests can be watched or monitored. Requests in the “gray area” can be challenged with a number of cutting-edge challenges. Our Crypto Challenge, for instance, forces bots to spend CPU cycles on pictographic puzzles, slowing attacks to a crawl and increasing costs for hackers.
Key capabilities of Bot Manager include:
- Known-bot directories. A current directory of 1,750 known bots enables Bot Manager to automatically respond appropriately to these bots.
- Dynamic bot detection. Using AI and machine learning models and techniques, Bot Manager accurately detects unknown bots at the first interaction.
- Custom settings per endpoint. The Bot Score can be strategically adjusted for each endpoint, setting custom thresholds that trigger specific responses.
- Autotuning. Bot Manager automatically tunes detections by learning the normal traffic patterns of a site and adjusting response notifications to avoid potentially misclassified requests.
Additional anti-bot solutions
Akamai Account Protector offers additional anti-bot verification technology in a solution designed to prevent account takeover. Because sophisticated bot traffic often precedes account takeover attempts, Account Protector uses both supervised and unsupervised algorithms to catch and mitigate adversarial bots on the first interaction.
To disrupt bot attacks, Account Protector uses behavioral detections to profile the typical activity patterns of account owners, device anomalies, and source reputation. When login requests are received, this Akamai solution assesses in real time the risk that the request is a fraudulent login attempt rather than one coming from a legitimate account owner. Akamai’s assessment is based on anomalies in a typical user behavior profile that may include devices normally used, IP addresses, networks, locations, and the frequency and time of logins.
Account Protector also provides anti-bot protection from bot networks that are involved in automated, large-scale attacks. Using behavior/telemetry analysis, automated browser detection, high request rate, HTTP anomaly detection, browser fingerprinting, and other detections, Account Protector detects and mitigates harmful bots to prevent fraudulent activity while still maintaining a frictionless experience for users.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
A bot is a computer program that is designed to emulate human activity and to automate certain tasks. Bots are often used to perform repetitive tasks, which they can perform faster and more accurately than humans. “Good” bots perform helpful or useful activities, while “bad” bots are used for malicious activities.
Cybercriminals and spammers use bots to carry out a variety of cyberattacks and illicit activities. Bots may be used to collect email addresses for spammers, to buy and resell tickets in scalping operations, to repeatedly download applications to increase download metrics, or to boost social media accounts by emulating real followers. Attackers may also use an army of bots, called a botnet, to carry out account takeover attacks, perform credential stuffing, or to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, puts apps and experiences closer to users and keeps threats farther away.