What Is Bot Detection?

A bot is a piece of software designed to perform specific or repetitive tasks, often simulating human activity. By automatically taking action without the need for human intervention, bots can replace time-consuming manual processes.

Many “good” bots perform helpful and essential activities.

• Web crawlers, also known as spiders, inspect content on websites for search engines such as Google and Bing.

• Chatbots simulate conversations with a human being to provide answers to questions or to guide customers to resources.

• Monitoring bots keep an eye on the health of a system or website.

Cybercriminals use bots and bot networks, or botnets, to perform a variety of malicious activity.

• Credential stuffing bots attempt to gain unauthorized access to a website’s login page by entering usernames and passwords stolen in a data breach.

• Inventory hoarding bots attempt to grab inventory before customers can buy it.

• Spambots harvest email addresses from websites that spammers can use to mimic human behavior and send unwanted and malicious mail.

• File-sharing bots observe a user’s search queries and provide bogus links that enable malicious actors to infect a computer with a virus or malware.

• Traffic bots mimic human activity on the web to drive up traffic and increase clicks on a website. 

• DDoS or distributed denial-of-service botnets attempt to overwhelm websites by flooding them with requests to take sites offline or hold them hostage until specific demands are met.

• Social media bots create fake accounts on social media platforms to support the ideas or increase the followers of a user or social media account.

• Download bots automatically download software or malware to boost download numbers and artificially help an application rank higher.

Knowing the difference between good and malicious bots is essential to stopping cyberattacks while permitting traffic that can improve productivity and facilitate communication. That’s why leading companies turn to security solutions from Akamai for superior bot detection.

Akamai Bot Manager offers unmatched bot detection and bot mitigation capabilities to let the good bots in, while keeping bad bots out, safeguarding customer trust. Bot Manager relies on multiple patented technologies to detect and stop bots where they make initial contact — rather than allowing them to reach your site first.

Akamai’s anti-bot capabilities work on Akamai Connected Cloud. This allows Bot Manager to watch traffic at the edge, where users first connect to applications. By reviewing an average of 11.5 billion bot requests per day and 280 million bot logins, Bot Manager has access to a wealth of clean data on traffic patterns, traffic types, and traffic volume. This visibility allows our algorithms to quickly learn more about both good and bad bots. Our 300+ threat researchers constantly track trends and attack patterns, technology innovation, and new evasions in order to improve our bot detection capabilities.

Each bot detected by Bot Manager receives a Bot Score. High-scoring bots are mitigated, while low-scoring bots can be watched or monitored. Bots with scores in between can be challenged with cutting-edge automation tools that force bots to spend CPU cycles on cryptographic puzzles, slowing sophisticated bot attacks to a crawl and driving up costs for attackers.

Since Akamai customers include more than 50% of global 500 organizations, we see traffic from some of the largest and most advanced bot operators. When a new bot is detected at one customer, data is immediately added to our known bot library and algorithms for all customers, making it easier to block bots that are deemed suspicious or malicious.

Capabilities of Akamai’s bot management solution include:

• Advanced bot detection using machine learning and AI models for user experience and behavior analysis, browser fingerprinting, and detection methods

• Stealthy bot protection that goes beyond block-and-allow actions to trick bots with fake content and slow them down

• Continuous updates to a directory of more than 1,750 known bots.

• Reporting and analysis that delivers real-time trends, industry insights, and detailed analysis of bot traffic

• Protection for mobile apps, providing bot detection for the entire attack surface

When deploying Akamai’s bot detection solution, you can:

• Build trust. Secure the trust of consumers, partners, and users by protecting from fraudulent transactions and reducing friction in their online experiences.

• Lower costs. Reduce the cost and effort required to replace stolen accounts, address user complaints, check on compromised accounts and web traffic, and also handle other types of fallout from bot attacks.

• Enhance control. Improve efficiency, minimize risk, reduce IT spend, and strategically manage partner bots.

Improve security posture. Detailed reporting dashboards and analytics help strengthen security posture by facilitating data-driven decision-making about risk tolerance and IT operations.