Rising Bot Attacks – Why is Your Organization Struggling to Deal with Them?

Bot attacks rose by 41% in H1 2021, with the financial services and media industries facing the highest proportion of these attacks. 71% of global CIOs/ CISOs admit that they have seen an increase in successful attacks, while 78% believe they had more customer churn and complaints owing to bot attacks.

Despite the increase in successful bot-based attacks, many organizations are underprepared to fend off these lethal and increasingly stealthy attacks. Read on to know why your organization fails to mitigate bot attacks.

Let’s discuss why organizations are unable to manage rising Bot attacks.

**Organizations are Underprepared **

Only 19% of organizations currently use full-fledged, comprehensive bot management solutions and programs, while 78% continue relying on WAFs, CDNs, and DDoS mitigation to prevent bot-based attacks.

This protects you only against ad frauds, influence fraud attacks, and card frauds, leaving you open to a wide range of more lethal, sophisticated attacks.

**One-Third of Bots can Mimic Human Behaviour **

Like organizations adapting to the changing times, attackers are leveraging automation, AI, and ML to ensure bots can behave more human-like, from mouse movements to keystrokes and clicks.

Since 37% of bad bots can closely mimic human behaviour, they can seamlessly evade detection by traditional security tools and defenses.

**Continuously Increasing Sophistication of Bot Attacks **

Malicious bots made up almost 28% of the global web traffic, a record high, in 2021. Of these, two-thirds were evasive bots capable of seamlessly evading security tools and defenses. They use techniques such as encrypted requests, anonymous proxies to enter websites and apps, masking/ changing identities, mimicking human behaviour, cycling through random IPs, and so on.

Bad bots also learn over time and automatically use different techniques to evade detection. Attackers leverage deep dark-web intelligence, highly sophisticated tools and the latest technology, mass data breaches, automated processes, and, most importantly, expansive global fraud networks to industrialize fraud and orchestrate attacks. This is another reason for the increasing sophistication of bot attacks.

Further, attackers can easily customize attacks for each target. Attackers take time and effort to understand bot mitigation techniques and keep creating mutated versions of bot attacks to ensure they can keep evading detection.

**The Array of New Endpoints Offers a Larger Attack Surface **

The attack surface has widened with the growing use of IoT devices, APIs, mobile devices, and microservices instead of single monolithic apps to offer better functionalities and user experiences. This has also led to increased misconfigurations, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and security complexities that you can simply not get ahead of.

These new endpoints, often under-protected or unprotected, become ripe targets for bot attacks. You cannot stop bot threats without comprehensive, advanced, and fully managed security solutions that include focused API bot mitigation.

**Traditional Signature-Based Detection is Found Wanting **

Several organizations, even with dedicated bot security solutions, cannot stop complex bot attacks. This is because their bot management solution focuses on traditional signature-based detection techniques.

Data suggest that bots are so smart and efficient today that automated attack signatures are three times more complicated than in previous years. To effectively stop these attacks, you would have to collect, review and correlate several data points to form a single attack signature. And this attack signature is bound to change as attackers constantly work to improve their modus operandi.

You need behaviour, pattern, and heuristic analysis, fingerprinting, and workflow validation to stop the complex automated attacks of today. This helps you identify anomalous behaviours and stop them. When backed by machine learning and artificial intelligence, these solutions can automatically redefine normal variance in acceptable behaviours.

**The Reliance on In-House Bot Management Solutions **

Several organizations continue to rely on in-house bot management solutions that are incapable of stopping the sophisticated automated threats of today. These solutions rely on signature-based detection. They only have access to internal data and past attack history but don’t have access to the global threat feeds.

Without visibility into the range of bots, evasion techniques, and the latest attacks, it is impossible to get ahead of the latest threats. Further, organizations may not engage in continuous research to understand the latest threats and find ways to avert them.

The Way Forward

To effectively avert and manage the latest breed of sophisticated and evasive bot attacks, you must invest in comprehensive, fully managed, and next-gen bot management solutions from trusted security experts like Indusface. This solution can identify and thwart bot attacks, including automated API bot threats.

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