What are bot detection tools?
Back to glossaryWhat are bot detection tools?
A bot detection tool is a software solution designed to distinguish and identify automated bot traffic from genuine human interactions on websites, apps, or networks. By analyzing behavior patterns, device characteristics, and other data points, these tools help differentiate legitimate users from harmful bots, which can be used for activities like credential stuffing, web scraping, and account takeover attacks. Bot detection not only protects against digital fraud and cyberattacks (75% of which come from bots) but also enables organizations to better understand their online traffic.
How do bot detection tools work?
Bot detection tools differentiate between human and robotic traffic to protect websites, applications, APIs, and anything else in a digital environment. To make that differentiation, bot detection tools analyze and identify patterns, behaviors, and characteristics in digital interactions that distinguish bots from genuine users. This may include behavioral analysis to spot repetitive or unnatural patterns, device fingerprinting, IP and network analysis, and advanced machine learning. To be effective, bot detection tools must determine whether traffic is legitimate within a matter of milliseconds. Anything longer can impact page load speed and cause a considerable disruption to the user experience.
What kind of attacks do bot detection tools pick up on?
A bot detection tool can prevent any attack that makes use of a bad bot. Some of the most common attacks include:
- Account takeover, where malicious actors gain access to a customer’s account to make fraudulent purchases, cash in on loyalty points, or cause reputational damage.
- Credential stuffing, where malicious actors use credentials (often from a data leak) to gain access to accounts.
- Web scraping, the automated process of extracting large amounts of data from websites for analysis, often using specialized software or bots.
- Transaction abuse, which involves actions like carding, where stolen credit card credentials are tested with small purchases.
What does HUMAN offer for bot detection tools?
HUMAN detects and mitigates sophisticated bot attacks with unparalleled speed, scale, and decision precision. Our solutions protect the entire digital customer journey across three critical surfaces:
- Advertising Protection detects and mitigates ad fraud pre- and post-bid to increase inventory transparency and ensure ads reach real humans across all channels.
- Application Protection defends against malicious bot attacks, including account takeover, scraping, transaction abuse and data contamination on web and mobile applications.
- Account Protection provides organizations with comprehensive account security to neutralize account takeover attacks (ATO), fake account abuse and compromised accounts before bad actors can exploit them.