Bots can perform various harmful attacks, and these attacks can have three different effects on your business.
1. Website performance
Bots will consume your site’s resources, potentially slowing it down for real users. It probably won’t be a big deal most of the time, but in the worst cases, it could make your site perform so badly that users can’t get to your service.
Google says that people will leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. This means that a website that loads slowly could lose you important leads or customers.
2. Financial losses
Bots can lead to financial losses in various ways, both directly and indirectly. Credential-cracking bots can successfully steal your customer’s private data, putting you at risk of losing that customer’s trust, which can easily be shared on social media, and ultimately, you could lose money.
Bots can also steal private information from your website and give it to your rivals. For instance, they could steal your confidential design plan or the price of a product that you intended to keep private. In the long run, such theft will hurt your financial success and could cost you a competitive edge.
3. Reputation
One-third of customers will stop doing business with a company that has had a data breach, and 70% said it would be hard to trust that company in the future.
Because of this, a data hack caused by malicious bots can hurt your image for a long time or even forever. Stopping bot attacks before they happen is better than being sorry later, as it can be hard to get back on track after.
To sum up, bots can hurt both your money and your image. For example, if your customers’ data is stolen in a major data breach, it could hurt your image for a long time or even permanently, and your customers will likely go to one of your competitors instead.
Top Recommendations To Protect Your Website From Bad Bots
We’ve discussed the negative effects of bot attacks and how hard they are to stop. Here are the best ways to protect your website:
1. Monitor Your Traffic For Excessive Bot Presence
Nearly 40% of all internet traffic comes from bot sites, as we’ve already talked about. This means that there are probably bot activities happening on your site. You can monitor your site for the following signs of bot traffic when there are too many bot activities on it:
- Increased page views: An unexpected and mysterious increase in page views is a typical sign of bot activities.
- Decreased dwell time: Bots usually only perform their tasks (such as trying to log in) and then leave the page right away. When the average stay time or session length drops by a lot, it’s usually a sign that something is wrong.
- Increased/decreased bounce rate: which measures the number of people who leave a page without clicking on anything or navigating to another page, can either increase or decrease. Again, bots usually leave the page once they’ve completed their tasks, which causes the return rate to go up. Another sign of bots that stay on your site is a sharp drop in the number of people who leave right away.
- Website performance: A major slowdown in your page speed could be a sign that many bots are making many calls on your server.
You may notice extra bot activity on your site if you observe any of those symptoms. However, this won’t help you tell the difference between good and bad bots. The next tip will do that.
2. Installing a Proper Bot Management Solution
There are many different bot management options on the market today, each with a different set of functions and a different price tag.
We can’t use old methods of finding bots, like CAPTCHA and fingerprinting-based solutions, anymore because robots are smarter than ever.
The tools used for bot management can find bots in three different ways:
- Fingerprinting-based (static) approach: the bot management solution looks at the “signatures” of the traffic, such as the OS version, IP address, browser types and versions, and so on, and compares them to known fingerprints of malicious bots.
- Challenge-based approach: the bot management solution offers a test that is intended to be simple for real people to complete but very hard for bots to complete. In this bot management approach, CAPTCHA is a very popular form.
- Behavioral-based (dynamic) approach: This type of approach has the bot management solution look at the client’s actions in real time and compare them to a known standard. For example, it might look at mouse movements and compare them to real users’ mouse movements.
This type of approach has the bot management solution look at the client’s actions in real time and compare them to a known standard. For example, it might look at mouse movements and compare them to real users’ mouse movements.
3. Implementing Bot Management Best Practices
You can protect your website even more from malicious bots by following these other hacking best practices:
- Installing WAF: A cloud-based web application firewall (WAF) can help stop some malicious bots based on their signatures and where they come from. They won’t be very effective at stopping clever bots, but they can be effective at protecting your website from attackers who are less stubborn.
- Robots.txt: This is a simple text file that defines the rules that bots should follow when they access your site’s resources. Bad bots won’t follow these rules, but robots.txt can still help you control both good bots and bad bots that aren’t very smart.
- Authentication/access control: Users should have strong, unique passwords, and you should use CAPTCHA and multi-factor authentication (MFA) in high-risk parts of your website, like where private transactions take place.
Conclusion
An advanced bot management solution is required to protect your website properly from bad bots and bot attacks these days due to the sophistication of malicious bots.
We recommend DataDome, an advanced bot management solution that utilizes its own AI and machine-learning technologies to automatically distinguish between good and bad bots in real time, eliminating the need for human intervention while continuously protecting your website.
