Bot Managers Are a Cash-Back Program For Your Company

by Ben Zilberman on April 17, 2019

In my previous blog, I briefly discussed what bot managers are and why they are needed. Today, we will conduct a short ROI exercise (perhaps the toughest task in information security!).

To recap: Bots generate a little over half of today’s internet traffic. Roughly half of that half (i.e. a quarter, for rusty ones like myself…) is generated by bad bots, a.k.a. automated programs targeting applications with the intent to steal information or disrupt service. Over the years, they have gotten so sophisticated, they can easily mimic human behavior, perform allegedly uncorrelated violation actions and essentially fool most of application security solutions out there.

These bots affect each and every arm of your business. If you are in the e-commerce or travel industries, no need to tell you that… if you aren’t, go to your next C-level executive meeting and look for those who scratch their heads the most. Why? Because they can’t understand where the money goes, and why the predicted performance didn’t materialize as expected.

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Let’s go talk to these C-Suite executives, shall we?

Chief Revenue Officer

Imagine you are selling product online–whether that’s tickets, hotel rooms or even 30-pound dog food bags–and this is your principal channel for revenue generation. Now, imagine that bots act as faux buyers, and hold the inventory “hostage” so genuine customers can not access them.

Sure, you can elapse the process every 10 minutes, but as this is an automated program, it will re-initiate the process in a split second. And what about CAPTCHA? Don’t assume CAPTCHA will weed out all bots; some bots activate after a human has solved it. How would you know when you are communicating with a bot or a human? (Hint: you’d know if you had a bot management solution).

Wondering why the movie hall is empty half the time even though it’s a hot release? Does everybody go to the theater across the street? No. Bots are to blame. And they cause direct, immediate and painful revenue loss.

Chief Marketing Officer

Digital marketing tools, end-to-end automation of the customer journey, lead generation, and content syndication are great tools that help CMOs measure ROI and plan budgets. But what if the analysis they provide are false? What if half the clicks you are paying for are fictitious, and you were subject to a click-fraud campaign by bots? What if a competitor uses a bot to scrape data of registrants out of your landing pages? Unfortunately, bots often skew the analysis and can lead you to make wrong decisions that result in poor performance. Without bot management, you’re wasting money in vain.

Chief Operations Officer/Chief Information Officer

Does your team complain that your network resources are in the “red zone,” close to maximum performance, but your customer base isn’t growing at the same pace?

Blame bots.

Obviously some bots are “good,” like automated services that help accelerate and streamline your business, analyze data quickly and help you to make better decisions. However, bad bots (26% of the total traffic you are processing) put a load on your infrastructure and make your IT staff cry for more capacity. So you invest $200-500K in bigger firewalls, ADCs, and broader internet pipes, and upgrade your servers.

Next thing you know, a large DDoS attack from IoT botnets knocks everything down. If only you had invested $50k upfront to filter out the bad traffic from the get-go… That could’ve translated to $300k cash back!

Chief Information Security Officer

Every hour, a new security vendor knocks on your door with another solution for a 0.0001% probability what-if scenario… your budget is all over the place, spent on multiple protections and a complex architecture trying to take an actionable snapshot of what’s going on at every moment. At the end of the day, your task is to protect your company’s information assets. And there are so many ways to get a hold of those precious secrets!

Bad bots are your enemy. They can scrape content, files, pricing, and intellectual property from your website. They can take over user accounts by cracking their passwords or launch a credential stuffing attack (and then retrieve their payment info). And they can take down service with DDoS attacks and hold up inventory, as I previously mentioned.

You can absolutely reduce these risks significantly if you could distinguish human versus bot traffic (remember, sophisticated bots today can mimic human behavior and bypass all sorts of challenges, not only CAPTCA), and more than that, which bot is legitimate and which is malicious.

Bot management equals less risk, better posture, stable business, no budget increases or unexpected expenses. Cash back!

Chief Financial Officer

Your management peers could have made better investments, but now you have to clean up their mess. This can include paying legal fees and compensation to customers whose data was compromised, paying regulatory fines for coming up short in compliance, shelling out for a crisis management consultant firm, and absorbing costs associated with inventory hold up and downed service.

If you only had a bot management solution in place… so much cash back.

The Bottom Line

Run–do not walk–to your CEO and request a much-needed bot management solution. Not only does s/he have nothing to lose, s/he has a lot to gain.

* This week, Radware integrates bot management service with its cloud WAF for a complete, fully managed, application security suite.

Read “Radware’s 2018 Web Application Security Report” to learn more.

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Ben Zilberman

Ben Zilberman is a product-marketing manager in Radware’s security team. In this role, Ben specializes in application security and threat intelligence, working closely with Radware’s Emergency Response and research teams to raise awareness of high profile and impending attacks. Ben has a diverse experience in network security, including firewalls, threat prevention, web security and DDoS technologies. Prior to joining Radware, Ben served as a trusted advisor at Checkpoint Software technologies where he led partnerships, collaborations, and campaigns with system integrators, service, and cloud providers. Ben holds a BA in Economics and a MBA, from Tel Aviv University.