Infographic: How Do You Stop Bad Bots?

According to Imperva’s Bad Bot Report 2021, bad bot traffic has maintained its upwards trend, amounting to 25.6 percent of all traffic in 2020, an all-time high. Combined with good bot traffic, 40.8 percent of internet traffic in 2020 wasn’t human, as human traffic decreased by 5.7 percent to 59.2 percent of all traffic. In a year when people were stuck at home during the pandemic and internet usage surged, it’s concerning to see that bot operators were also more active than ever and the proportion of automated traffic reached new heights.

Advanced persistent bots (APBs) make up the largest share of bad bot traffic, which according to the report accounted for more than 57 percent of it. These APBs are a combination of moderate and sophisticated bad bots that are harder to detect and mitigate. They cycle through random IPs, enter through anonymous proxies, change their identities and mimic human behavior.

The report also reminds us that bad bots capable of performing malicious actions continue to affect all industries. Some industries have their own unique bad bot problem, while some bad bot problems are pan-industry. For example, Account Takeover, as well as Content and Price Scraping are among the problems that are rampant across many industries.

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The challenge here is fairly well articulated. So how do you stop bad bots? Advanced Bot Protection gives visibility and control over human, good bot, and bad bot traffic without imposing friction on legitimate users. As bots evolved, so did mitigation techniques. There are currently three technical approaches to detecting and mitigating bad bots. The infographic below explains how they work.

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Imperva’s bot management solution uses all three approaches covered above—static, challenge-based, and behavior-based—to investigate each visitor on your site, whether human or not, and match it with a behavioral ID. It can effectively protect against malicious bots while ensuring that legitimate bots and human users have uninterrupted access to your site.

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