Bot or Not? Distinguishing Between the Good, the Bad & the Ugly
Bots touch virtually every part of our digital lives. They help populate our news feeds, tell us the weather, provide stock quotes, control our search rankings, and help us comparison shop. We use bots to book travel, for online customer support, and even to turn our lights on and off and unlock our doors.
Yet, for every ‘good’ bot, there is a nefarious one designed to disrupt, steal or manipulate. Indeed, at least one third of all Internet traffic is populated by a spectrum of ‘bad’ bots. On one end, there are the manipulative bots, like those designed to buy out retailers’ inventory to resell high-demand goods at markup (like limited edition sneakers or ticket scalping) or simulate advertiser click counts. On the other, more extreme end, malicious bots take over accounts, conduct API abuse and enslave our IoT devices to launch massive DDoS attacks.
Equally troubling is the speed at which the bot ecosystem is evolving. Like most criminal elements, threat actors are singularly focused in their goals: They constantly update, mutate, and modify their tool sets to work around the various protections companies put in place.
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In other words, what protected your organization against bots last year may not work today. Research from Radware’s 2018 State of Web Application Security Report shows that most organizations rely on tools like CAPTCHA to detect their bot traffic, but modern, sophisticated bots can easily bypass those tools, making it difficult to even detect bot traffic, let alone identify the bot’s intentions.
Organizations need to look for bot management solutions that not only effectively detect and mitigate bot attacks but can also distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bots in real-time.
Yesterday, Radware announced its intent to acquire ShieldSquare, which is a pioneer in the bot mitigation industry and one of three recognized solution leaders by Forrester with strong differentiation in the Attack Detection, Threat Research, Reporting, and Analytics categories.
The strong technology synergy between the two companies around advanced machine learning and the opportunity to extend Radware’s existing cloud security services bring a tremendous advantage to our customers and partners.
[You may also like: 9 Ways to Ensure Cloud Security]
This acquisition allows Radware to expand our portfolio with more robust bot management solutions that can stand alone as product offerings as well as integrate into our suite of attack mitigation solutions. Radware will offer ShieldSquare’s bot management and mitigation product under the new Radware Bot Management product line. It enhances Radware’s advanced anti-bot capabilities from multi-protocol IoT DDoS attacks to more crafted e-commerce attacks affecting six emerging problems:
- Data harvesting and Scraping Attacks
- Account creation and Account Takeover Attacks
- Denial of Inventory
- Application DDoS & Brute Force Attacks
- Brand Image / Reputation Attacks
It also provides ShieldSquare’s customers with access to the full suite of Radware security and availability solutions both on-prem and in the cloud, including our Cloud WAF services for comprehensive protection of applications.
We look forward to welcoming the ShieldSquare team into the Radware family and joining forces to offer some of the world’s best bot management solutions.
