Balancing Bot Management with User Experience in eCommerce

At nearly half of all internet traffic, bot traffic is everywhere. While some bots are useful and facilitate your online experience, many are malicious and pose a threat to your e-commerce platforms. Whether you have a website, application, or both, bot attacks threaten your customers’ experience and your data security.

There are a number of growing threats that bots pose. To combat them, you’ll need advanced bot protection that can adapt to changing threats in real-time without blocking your customers. While you don’t want a bot to access your resources, granular control is essential to prevent revenue losses due to lost customers.

The Rising Threat of Malicious Bots

With the growth of smart devices and IoT, the numbers of unsecured or poorly secured devices are also increasing. Many people neglect to secure their devices properly, and because each one connects to a network, the devices are sitting ducks for exploitation. They are also very desirable targets.

Malicious actors turn these devices into bots, recruiting them into expansive botnets. These botnets then perform attacks on websites and applications, wreaking havoc on the host and creating connectivity issues for legitimate users.

Often, the botnets are set up to perform automated attacks. The advent of easily accessible AI and machine learning tools have also been contributors to increasingly sophisticated bot behavior. As a result, bot attacks are more sophisticated, frequent, and severe than they have been in the past.

Some common attack types include:

• Credential stuffing. If an attacker compromises a database that contains usernames and passwords, he can then use bots to attempt logins with these credentials. The bots will plug in combinations until something works, which is a problem for both the compromised users and for your overtaxed resources.
• DDoS. When massive numbers of bots begin making requests, a server or application’s resources will quickly become overwhelmed. This prevents legitimate users from accessing resources. DDoS attacks are also becoming easier to launch, and some malicious actors offer them as a service. This means that anyone can attack your organization, regardless of technological expertise.
• Click fraud. If you’re paying an advertiser per click, you are at risk of click fraud. In this attack, bots run up your click count to raise your bill. This type of attack may come from a competitor or an unhappy customer.
• Brute force. In this type of attack, bots attempt to access your resources by repeatedly plugging in inputs until they guess credentials correctly. If this attack succeeds, at least one of your users is compromised and you may be in violation of compliance laws, depending on where your business operates.
• Scraping. Bots, posing as a legitimate user, infiltrate your website or application and collect proprietary data in a scraping attack. Some scraping attacks are intended to pull data for training AI and language-learning models.

To prevent these kinds of attacks, organizations must implement security tools that can detect and block them. However, calibrating the rules that the tools use to block attacks poses its own challenges.

The Usability vs. Security Dilemma

While bot activity is a major problem for organizations and legitimate users, not all mitigation strategies balance usability and security properly. As bots become more sophisticated , it is harder for detection tools to differentiate between a human and a bot.

Security tools typically detect attacks based on known traffic patterns and typical user behavior. When a bot is able to imitate typical behavior, many traditional tools are duped and allow the bots access to the application. To compensate, some security professionals adjust detection parameters so that a broader range of requests are blocked.

However, this is generally not the best solution. Blocking too many requests will hamper the experience of your legitimate users, and if they aren’t able to use your app, you risk losing customers and revenue. Easy access is imperative for most online users, and they will typically find a competitor if it is too difficult or onerous to work with your organization.

On the other hand, blocking too few requests leaves your front door open to attack. If your blocks are not sensitive enough, you risk allowing the more sophisticated bots through. Once they’re inside your infrastructure, finding them will be no easy task. To effectively balance these two competing priorities, advanced bot management solutions are required.

Optimizing User Experience and Security

To create the best user experience without sacrificing security, you need bot management solutions that can identify advanced, AI-driven bots. They should also be able to adapt and learn as threats evolve. Solutions that have AI and machine learning built into them will be best equipped to do this.

Some other features of effective security tools include:

• Web application firewall (WAF). WAFs act as a barrier around your application, and they are a critical tool for blocking bot traffic. When a WAF has incorporated AI and machine learning, it can adapt to both known and novel threats in real-time and adjust its own detection rules based on context.
• API protection. Much of the web relies on APIs to function, and APIs and applications are highly interconnected. If one is compromised, attackers can use their access to compromise other connections. API protection helps protect access points and further limits bot access.
• Advanced bot protection. This uses a combination of automated monitoring, security testing, and detailed reports to protect your organization from compromise.

With the right tools, your organization can prevent or mitigate bot attacks without impacting the user experience. Although bot attacks are increasing in both volume and severity, you can leverage advanced protection solutions to protect your e-commerce platforms and ensure both your own and your customers’ data are protected.