A Buyer’s Guide to Bot Management
Web-based bots are a critical part of your business’s digital presence. They help collect content, index it, and even promote it to your customers. A bot may even be responsible for getting you here. These are good bots and they help your business grow, providing consumers with individualized, interesting content.
Not all bots have good intentions, though. In fact, about one quarter of the traffic on the internet can be bad bots. Bad bots can do things like automated account takeover, inventory manipulation, content or price scraping, and skew analytics.
Unwanted Bot Traffic
In a recent customer engagement, we found that over 85% of their traffic was unwanted bot traffic. Not only does this create an undesirable situation for the content managers and the security team, but the company also had to overbuild their infrastructure in order to support that unwanted traffic. Without a way to distinguish between good bots and bad bots, they needed to support it all.
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Allowing the good bots to access your website while blocking the bad ones is nearly impossible if you don’t have the right tools. Understanding the bot landscape can be a daunting task and choosing the right solution can be a challenge if you don’t know what to look for.
The bots themselves are changing too. The rise of highly sophisticated human-like bots in recent years requires more advanced techniques in detection and response than in the past.
Choosing The Right Solution
When choosing the right solution for your environment, you need to understand how a vendor’s solution identifies bots and their intent. If a threat is detected, how will the solution manage it? Do you want to block the bot, or maybe feed it fake data as a countermeasure?
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Having flexible deployment options is also critical because every environment is different. Look for a bot management solution that provides easy, seamless deployment without infrastructure changes or the need to reroute traffic if you don’t want to.
Radware’s Ultimate Guide to Bot Management is a foundational resource for understanding bots, their benefits, the challenges they create, and what you should consider when deciding on a solution for bot management. At the end of this e-book, you’ll find a buyer’s checklist that will help you understand what criteria to evaluate when selecting the right bot management solution for your environment.
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Businesses need to manage bot traffic and associated risks, whether for security, brand protection, revenue protection or infrastructure protection. And because most organizations can’t tell the difference between good bots and bad bots in their network, you may not even be sure if you have a bot problem (pro-tip:Radware’s Bad Bot Analyzer will help you assess the true bot activity in your environment for free).
