Top 10 Considerations When Looking for a Bot Prevention Vendor

There was a 25% increase in bot traffic in Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021. 93% of attacks were bot-driven in Q1 2022, while there was a 250% increase in data scraping and a 4% increase in the credential stuffing. The easy availability of fraud-as-a-service lowers the entry barriers for attackers and enables them to orchestrate bot attacks. Finding the right bot prevention vendor is the most important step in strengthening bot prevention and mitigation.

This article delves into the top 10 considerations in choosing a bot prevention vendor.

Choosing a Bot Prevention Vendor: Top 10 Considerations

Overall Effectiveness 

Don’t go by the lofty marketing claims of 99.9% effectiveness that many bot mitigation vendors tend to make. Instead, gauge the overall effectiveness of the solution they are offering by evaluating their ability to identify and tackle sophisticated bots. Evaluate the vendor’s methods, techniques, and technology in detecting bot traffic and isolating bad bots. This is critical since the bot landscape is quickly evolving, with several new bots, advanced bots, and mutated versions of bots constantly appearing in the landscape.

Coverage

The vendor must provide comprehensive coverage in bot attack prevention, including spamming, credential stuffing, price scraping, content aggregation, spoofing, etc. They must cover all customer touchpoints, including web applications, IoT devices, mobile apps, APIs, etc., against automated and bot attacks. The bot management solutions offered must effectively protect against threats faced by the entire website and individual pages, such as product pages, blogs, login pages, etc.

Resilience in Protection

Bots, once blocked, don’t go away but keep mutating, retooling, and coming back to evade your detection mechanisms and security controls. So, the bot prevention vendor must use self-learning AI to learn and evolve to protect against evolving and mutating bots. They must leverage behavioral analysis, pattern and heuristic analysis, fingerprinting, global threat intelligence, attack history, and to remain effective even when bots mutate.

Ask for proof of concept and references to check if the solution is actually resilient instead of going by verbal and/or marketing assurances.

Efficacy and Flexibility of Responses

Evaluate how the bot prevention solution responds upon detecting bot activity and how efficient and effective those responses are. Does the vendor block all bots.? Then, the solution is ineffective as bot traffic contains good bots too. Good bots, such as search engine bots, copyright bots, etc., are extremely beneficial to the business, and they shouldn’t be blocked.

Understand the methods used by the vendor to distinguish the bots. Also, make sure the vendor offers other response types such as flagging, challenging, alerting, misdirecting, creating honeypots, etc., in addition to blocking.

In some cases, good bots could erode your website’s performance because of the time of day they are operating. So, choose a vendor who offers flexibility in creating more categories for different bot types, managing them, and applying actions flexibly based on contextual intelligence.

Visibility, Explainability, and Transparency

The bot prevention vendor must offer 24×7 visibility into the security posture, granular traffic analysis, and reliable evidence, not just some high-level statistics alone. They must be able to explain and be transparent about the methods used, how they reached conclusions about different requests, etc. The solution must allow you to investigate, zoom in on specific bots, etc.

False Positive Management

While how they avoid bots is an important consideration, it is equally important to know how they handle false positives. High false positives would mean your legitimate users are being turned away or hassled. Choose vendors who have a proper false positive management system. They must continuously tune the solution to effectively minimize false-positive rates instead of only throwing CAPTCHA that erodes customer experiences.

Detailed and Customizable Reporting

Detailed out-of-the-box and customizable reports are valuable to businesses in further strengthening security, making data-driven business decisions, resource allocation, risk minimization, budgeting, getting executive buy-in, etc. Ensure the bot mitigation vendor offers a dashboard where you can view reports and insights and generate custom reports and visualization.

Deployment Methods

Understand what deployment methods are offered and if they will suit your needs. Find out about disruptions, downtimes, etc., during deployment.

Managed Services

Choose bot attack prevention solutions that certified security experts fully manage. This is especially critical for SMEs who may not have the expertise, time, or resources to manage bots and control their impact on the business.

With fully managed services, you can rest assured that someone is always monitoring and managing the complex bots and that they are equipped to create sophisticated custom rules to avert automated attacks.

Total Pricing

Look for hidden costs such as development overheads, technical support, on-demand services, etc., that may not be reflected in the price quoted by the bot prevention vendor and consider the total pricing.

Here is a comparision of feaures, benefits and limitaiton of top 13 bot management software in the market.

Conclusion

Choosing the right bot management solution is key to effective protection. Always partner only with reputable, credible, and reliable bot prevention vendors with ample experience and trusted expertise.

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