Click here to get this post in PDF
At any company, both offline and online security is essential to ensure smooth operations and security of data or the premises. Most companies use cameras, motion detectors, and guards to ensure only authorized personnel access the premises. It’s necessary to have the same security feature as your company website to prevent unauthorized access.
Failure to secure your website may lead to loss of company or customer information and data. One of the effective ways of enhancing the security of your website is by using bot management techniques. This technique helps distinguish between bad and good bots, thus identifying and blocking malicious and unwanted bot traffic. Let’s look at bot management and the strategies they use to work.
What is Bot Management?
It refers to restricting or limiting access of unwanted or malicious bots to your website while allowing legitimate ones to access your systems. The strategy simply aims at filtering the bots you want to access your websites or systems. It’s good to understand that not all bots are bad; some bots like Google crawlers are beneficial to your website.
The bot management strategies employ strategies that allow the user to check and understand the cavities of any bot. They help detect bots logging in to the user accounts; they block this bot after realizing any attempt to attack the website. The blocking and restriction of unauthorized bots help to ensure the website performance doesn’t lag and prevents any security breaches.
It’s good to understand that malicious and unauthorized access to your websites causes overload to the server, thus slowing the system down. Additionally, they bar your legitimate bots from accessing the system and interfere with your intellectual property, customer data, and essential system files. Hackers can also use this information to plan and execute a series of cyber-attacks or even robberies.
Goals of Bot Management
Bot management is a vital security strategy for most companies or websites. Having working bot management strategies helps the website and companies achieve the following goals.
● Verifies the Bot Reputation
On the website, you can get many bots where some are legitimate while others are bad. A sound bot management system helps identify the reputation of these bots identifying the malicious and legitimate ones. The bot manager uses the IP addresses to verify the bots and block them based on their IP address’s reputation.
● Identify Bot and Human Visitors on the Website
The bot management strategies help to check, identify and differentiate the visitors to the website. The system helps to detect if it’s a bot trying to gain access or a human being. This information helps to regulate visits to your website, which helps to reduce the number of unauthorized access to your site.
● Behavior Analysis
The behavior analysis is vital for identifying the reputation of the bots; thus, it helps you choose those you can bar and those you can allow to your website. It’s essential to ensure your bots can analyze the behaviors of the different bots correctly. For example, if the bot manager realizes a particular bot attempting many logins to a client’s or customer’s accounts, the manager should realize the malicious behavior and block the bot.
● Protecting Company’s or Customer’s Data
Protection of the company’s data is essential to verify and guarantee the proper functionality of the website and its activities. Safeguarding the data is also vital to protect the company from cyber-attacks or possible robberies. The bot manager will help enhance data protection by limiting the access of the websites’ data and information to only legitimate bots.
● Prevents any Credit Card or Gift Fraud
Hackers use bots’ data to access the gift or credit card accounts; later, they create fake gift cards. They use these gift cards or exchange them for cash, thus leading to losses at the companies. Additionally, they use the data to steal or access credit card information and increase limits or alter the data.
The bot management strategies use different approaches to ensure only legitimate bots access the gift and credit card information. They only allow human users to access credit card information to enhance gift and credit card information security.
Bot Management Approaches
Bot management needs to have sound strategies to identify and differentiate between legitimate and malicious bots visiting a particular site. To achieve the goals, the bot managers should use strategies that match the attackers’ capabilities and mechanism of action. Let’s look at the bot managers’ approaches for detecting and managing the bots to your website.
1.Static Approach
The bot management applies different analytic tools, which helps in identifying request and header information. Most of the information comes from bots that have a reputation for malicious activities on different websites. This method is essential only to detect and block bots that have reputations of malicious activities.
2.Challenge-based Approach
The bot management can also use challenges and question switches that are usually complex for the malicious bots. Most of the malicious boots will find it difficult to perform these challenges, and thus they will be denied access to the website. The questions and challenges the management system can use include the CAPTCHA verifications, running JavaScript, and accepting cookies. The challenge-based approach is vital to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots to your site.
3.Behavioral Approach
While using the behavioral approach, the bot manager analyzes the bot’s behavior and matches it with the expected patterns. Matching these patterns helps check the legitimacy of the bots and allows only the legitimate bots to access the website. To use this technique effectively, the bot manager needs to classify the users or individuals logged into the website as human users, excellent bots, and malicious bots.
Bottom Line
Bot management is an integral part of a website’s security, which is essential to help protect the data and activities on your website by restricting malicious bots. It uses different approaches to distinguish between the human users’ malicious and legitimate bots accessing the website. Therefore, it’s vital that when choosing, you choose bot management software that offers the best approaches to bar or restrict any malicious bots from your websites. This restriction helps enhance the security of the website’s data, enhance the website’s performance, and prevent any possible cyber-attacks or robbery.
You may also like: 5 Benefits of Performance Management Software
Image source: Shutterstock.com
