How Autopilot Bot & Fraud Protection Becomes a Force Multiplier for Your Team
You may be familiar with the endless battle against fraudsters, malicious traffic, and bad bots. Online threats are evolving and becoming more advanced each day, which becomes increasingly taxing for online business leaders trying to keep their platforms and customers safe. Your team might be spending countless hours creating rules to stop bots—only to have new rules circumvented the next day.
I started to look for a class of solutions which would be sort of adaptive—smart systems that could understand our traffic, learn from it, and evolve.
Rules-based security systems (e.g. web application firewalls or “WAFs”) were effective once upon a time, in the past. But rules-based security can only protect against known threats you have already made rules for—leaving you vulnerable to attack routes and possibilities you have not seen before.
Bots today are not targeting known vulnerabilities; they are finding new ways to get into your system alongside your legitimate users. As bot attacks become more advanced, they appear more like peaks of legitimate traffic.
[Using a WAF] was very reactive. Any time we were under attack, we’d have to go into Cloudflare, try to identify the malicious IPs, and block them manually. But by then, our site would already be slow; that’s why we’d go look at our Cloudflare traffic in the first place. The process of manually identifying and blocking IPs could also be very time-consuming.
If you don’t think the manual bot mitigation process described above seems like the most efficient use of a team’s resources, you are absolutely right. That’s why leading enterprises today have identified the need for accurate bot and fraud protection on autopilot. It gives key stakeholders peace of mind to refocus their team’s time on revenue-driving activity.
Defending our site was taking a lot of effort, not only for our [development] team, but for our support teams as well. It was sucking resources away from other business-critical operations. In order to return our attention to these operations and drive the business forward, we wanted to automate our bot attack prevention.
What could your business accomplish if stopping bots was handled on autopilot by a solution with unparalleled accuracy, needing little to no intervention from your team?
The Solution: Advanced Bot & Fraud Protection on Autopilot
The most efficient and effective way to stop fraudulent traffic and bad bots from damaging your business is to leverage an adaptive, machine learning (ML) driven, non-rules-based approach, something you can “set and forget”. For example, DataDome’s unmatched two-layer bot detection engine blocks malicious traffic with industry-leading speed and accuracy.
The solution is monitored 24/7 by our SOC and threat research experts—just in case any of the ML models need to be adjusted—so no maintenance is required from your team. Automatic protection for your business means more time to focus on what matters most.
Bad bot traffic was my number one worry for a long time. Now, it’s not even in the top five… To be able to just move this off my plate, let the tool run and focus my energy on revenue-generating tasks, that’s what’s been most important.
How can a bot management software stop advanced bad bots automatically?
By using ML to automatically adjust to new threats in real time and instantly scale intelligence across all global properties protected, DataDome stays ahead of the ever-evolving threat landscape. To be extra safe, DataDome guarantees the following protection measures:
- From the first request, and throughout each end-user’s complete journey across all endpoints on your platform, DataDome inspects every request, every time to understand user intent and to prevent mid-session handoffs to bad actors. That way advanced threats, such as attacks using a hu-bot hybrid approach or CAPTCHA farms, don’t stand a chance at wreaking havoc on your platform.
- Our 24/7 SOC and threat research teams proactively monitor customer traffic, examine outliers, and adjust DataDome’s ML models as needed. By constantly looking for new ways to identify malicious activity and stop attackers in their tracks, the team keeps customers protected, no matter what bot developers try next.
Before DataDome, we could spend up to 50 man-hours per day prepping our servers for launches, monitoring logs, and handling customer complaints. And that’s not even counting the time our system integrators spent blocking IPs instead of focusing on the developments we wanted. Now, I don’t even know DataDome is running—it’s just there in the background, doing its job. I haven’t had a bot-related discussion for something like three months, which is fantastic!
DataDome customers can also implement specific rules that align with your business needs to best protect your website, mobile app, and/or API, but the core of DataDome’s protection is automatic.
Our solution analyzes the behavior and intent of each user making a request, not a specific signature or trait. Suspicious behavior is scrutinized more heavily, typically presented with a user-friendly CAPTCHA—and DataDome makes a decision on whether to allow a request in under 2 milliseconds.
Just the fact that we no longer have to upscale our servers for two-hour spikes of launch activity means that DataDome pays for itself—and that’s without mentioning the time my team is saving.
How to stay ahead of attackers on autopilot:
The benefit of ML is that it can update automatically based on new data. New bot attacks are used to train the engine in real time, and suspicious behaviors from one attack, in the US for example, are shared everywhere to stop similar attacks worldwide. By processing, on average, three trillion signals on a daily basis—DataDome’s bot detection engine can identify a brand new bot pattern every single millisecond.
My favorite feature is the AI detection. … Bots are getting sneakier and sneakier, and it’s nice to know that DataDome keeps up with new threats and prevents them from hammering our website.
You Can Save Time & Money While Stopping Bad Bots
Deploying powerful, automatic bot and fraud protection will save your team the time and energy previously wasted on manual bot attack mitigation, allowing you to focus on what matters most to your business.
I haven’t really had to do anything, it’s been ‘set it and forget it.’
DataDome’s SOC and threat research teams constantly look for the newest tools and techniques used by cybercriminals and update our detection models as needed.
With an autopilot solution like DataDome’s, you can stop losing countless hours to rule tweaking and whack-a-mole; DataDome just works out of the box. DataDome also provides real-time insights into bot attacks, down to a single request, so you are free to see as much detail as you want on your web traffic.
To see your web traffic and ongoing threats in real time, try DataDome free for 30 days, or book a demo today.
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from DataDome authored by DataDome. Read the original post at: https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/autopilot-bot-fraud-protection-force-multiplier/
