What is Bot Mitigation? | 4 Types of Bots & Botnets | How to Stop Bots

Bot mitigation is the process of reducing the risk of automated bot attacks and stopping them from exploiting your websites, mobile apps, and visitors. 

Bad bots flood login pages, shopping carts and payment forms. They tax organizations’ infrastructure, slow performance and increase your costs, which drives up operational expenses. Many efforts to thwart bad bots – such as CAPTCHAs (challenge–response tests used to determine whether a website visitor is a human or a bot) and multifactor authentication (MFA) – frustrate human users and lead to website abandonment. 

Bot mitigation involves the use of technologies to enforce policies that protect against bot attacks. This means using intelligence signals to detect malicious bot behavior at the onset of attacks and adopting a strategy for appropriate mitigation approaches. Bot mitigation solutions stop malicious bots before they affect websites, mobile applications and application programming interfaces (APIs). 


Bot mitigation also critically involves distinguishing bots from real people, separating bad bots from good bots, and dealing with malicious activity. And this doesn’t just mean blocking. Other tactics include proactive measures to prevent bot attacks and redirecting the malicious web traffic elsewhere. 

Once an organization starts doing business on the internet and starts getting steady visitor traffic, bad bots come with the territory. Bots account for approximately half of all web traffic. A successful bot attack can damage your company’s brand reputation, reduce consumer trust, and cause financial losses. 

Some bad bots flood web login fields with stolen credentials as cybercriminals try to gain unauthorized access to users’ accounts. Others make modest purchases with stolen credit cards to determine active, viable accounts for future fraud. Bad bots load online shopping carts with high-demand goods and resell them at inflated prices. Still others execute content scraping to copy an organization’s intellectual property and product information and gain a competitive edge. 

A further problem is that when you can’t distinguish bot traffic from human consumer traffic, it skews business analytics. Faulty analytics lead you to misinterpret trends and make costly mistakes. Effective bot mitigation stops the bots that start these cascading adverse effects, reducing your risk.

Carding bots: Carding bots test stolen credit and debit card details on site checkout forms and pages. These bots confirm active cards by attempting to make modest purchases on e-commerce sites. If a user’s payment goes through, the card number is validated and marked for future use. Most commonly, fraudsters use validated cards to buy gift cards, which are then used to make high-dollar purchases such as laptops, smart TVs, and smartphones with little scrutiny from card companies. The cybercriminals finish laundering the money by selling the goods online.

Credential stuffing bots:  Credential stuffing bots attempt logins across popular sites using lists of stolen usernames and passwords. When the credentials work, malicious hackers gain unauthorized access to user accounts. They can use this access to make fraudulent purchases with stored payment data, steal gift cards and loyalty points, submit fake credit applications, post fake reviews or sell the credentials to other criminal actors on the dark web.

Scalping bots: Scalping bots use fake accounts to snatch up high-demand goods, such as limited-edition sneakers, concert tickets and rare collectibles. Once the bots deplete a store’s inventory, cybercriminals can resell the items at a high markup on third-party sites or the dark web.

Scraping bots: Scraping bots routinely crawl the internet at scale, analyzing and copying product descriptions, images and prices from your sites for malicious purposes. Your rivals can use the data to compete with you on price, robbing you of profits. They may even republish your original images and content explicitly, which can lower your position in search engine rankings. 

A bot mitigation solution prevents bot attacks using advanced detection and prevention techniques. These include behavioral analysis, intelligent fingerprinting and predictive analysis to identify malicious bots in real time. Detection triggers enforcement technologies that block, rate-limit, or redirect bot attacks to decoy sites. 

Here are some ways that bot mitigation solutions identify bots:

• Turn behavioral signals from users, browsers, and networks into dynamic behavior profiles that tell a story of how users interact with your business online.
• Use fingerprinting and behavior modeling to identify bots when they visit your site.
  Analyze keystroke rhythm, cursor movement, course, and speed to look for anomalous behavior.
• Log IP addresses, session duration, bounce rate, and pageviews to find abnormal browsing and request patterns.
• Enable proof-of-work tactics to make it difficult and costly to conduct automated attacks at scale.

When a bot mitigation solution detects bots, it can trigger a range of enforcement actions: 

• Limit how often a user can repeat an action, such as a login attempt, within a certain time frame. This is known as rate-limiting.
• Use deception techniques and honeypots to redirect bot traffic for in-depth analysis using forensic tools and techniques.
• Serve a challenge-response test, such as a CAPTCHA. One caveat is that CAPTCHA-solving bots are not deterred by this technique.
• Trigger multifactor authentication and ask users for additional verification.
  Block access to the page or site.

The Human Defense Platform detects and mitigates bad bots with unparalleled accuracy. It includes Account Takeover Defense, Transaction Abuse Defense, Scraping Defense, Fake Account Defense, Compromised Account Defense, Ad Fraud Defense, Ad Fraud Sensor, and Data Contamination Defense. Using a combination of intelligent fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and predictive methods, HUMAN mitigates bad bots in real time on web and mobile apps, and APIs. Our 400-plus machine learning algorithms that evolve and become more sophisticated in real time to keep pace with morphing bot behaviors.

If required, HUMAN leverages Human Challenge, a user-friendly human verification system that weeds out bad bots without frustrating real human users. Human Challenge stops CAPTCHA-solving bots, accelerates human solve times, and reduces page abandonment. Furthermore, the solution is low latency and does not impact page load performance. 

With 40-plus integrations, HUMAN's solutions work with your existing infrastructure, preserve your application performance and extend bot protection across all your web and mobile applications, and API endpoints. It makes it faster and easier for developers to work in their organization’s hybrid environment. This includes seamless integrations with a wide range of content delivery networks (CDNs), load balancers, web and application servers, as well as leading analytics platforms to provide tailored analytics for your web properties. 

HUMAN forms a robust and layered barrier against bots attacks, wherever they happen along your users’ digital journey.

What is account takeover? | How to detect & stop it

Carding: What it is and how to prevent it

What is scraping? | Protection from web scraping & data scraping

What is bot traffic? | Block bad bots from attacks

What is bot detection? | How to detect & block bad bots