What’s up Bot? 10 Questions to Ask a Bot Mitigation Vendor – TechNative

So , you think you solved your bot problem, but now you are unsure.

Or perhaps your own contract is up for renewal, and you are doing due diligence to see if you are getting the best ROI from your bot management vendor partnership.

While performance, analytics, and logs look good, all your efforts to improve your digital experiences and delight your customers have not borne fruit. Revenue has not followed. Chargebacks are at an all-time high. Customers are calling the help desk and complaining about difficulty transacting on your site and are moving to competitors in droves. Your security and risk teams are complaining about an onslaught of false positives that are distracting them from strategic business initiatives.

Here are ten key questions to ask your robot mitigation merchant.

1 . How does the vendor measure success?

The name of the game is  efficacy … or is it?

When considering factors such as false positives, user friction, opportunities to personalize or improve the customer experience, and maintaining resilience no matter how criminals retool their attacks, we are talking more about  effectiveness .

2 . Does the service protect apps and APIs across different environments plus clouds?

Are you able to run your business the way you see fit, leveraging the appropriate business continuity and ecosystems that streamline your operations and give you the highest competitive advantage, or are you required to rearchitect your environment and move your own digital footprint into the vendor’s proprietary platform? What if that platform experiences degradation, or even an outage?

It is now possible to deploy bot defense anywhere to protect apps plus APIs everywhere, with insertion points across clouds and architectures that will enable rapid and robust protection—reducing complexity, increasing reliability, and supporting innovation while effectively managing risk.

3. Are you able to maximize your existing protection investments?

Most safety and danger teams have deployed complex tools to run their business and combat ever-evolving threats. For example , web application firewalls, application proxies, and as-a-service application platforms for e-commerce.

Leveraging existing investments whilst bolstering defenses against bots and malicious automation are ideal for practitioners that have limited time to learn the operational side of a new security tool or platform. This also helps align teams that otherwise focus on different parts of the attack lifecycle.

The ideal supplier can maximize existing protection investments plus minimize the particular operational burden on safety and fraud teams.

4. What type of controls does the vendor use to prevent tampering and bypass?

Bad actors will leverage reconnaissance and reverse engineering to bypass anti-automation defenses and evade detection. Dark internet forums are usually filled with examples of how to evade popular android management systems. Automation frameworks continue to evolve and can  emulate   or even  exhibit   human behaviour.

The best protection? Base recognition on a variety of advanced network, device, environmental, and behavioral signals using durable plus heavily encrypted/obfuscated telemetry that is essentially spoof-proof. For example , F5’s JavaScript leverages bespoke, per-customer implementations, and frequent bytecode randomizations within machine-level opcodes, making it computationally unrealistic in order to reverse engineer. This results in accurate detection and security countermeasures which are resistant to attacker manipulation.

Additionally , AI-based retrospective analysis plus continuous monitoring by Security Operations Center (SOC) team members can uncover unusual traffic patterns or even tampering.

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5. Does the service provide controls to prevent attacks  through  third-party APIs and aggregators?

Robot management needs to support business opportunities enabled through third-party integrations without introducing risk of compromise  through   such integrations. How? By leveraging policies with fine-grained control of allowed/legitimate aggregators and associated permissions instead of employing a false dichotomy associated with allowing or disallowing aggregators globally.

6. How many stages of detection will the vendor offer?

If the motivated bad actor is sophisticated, a person better prepare to enter the war room for some good old-fashioned “battle of the bots” exercises.

It is imperative to employ multiple stages of recognition based on accurate and durable telemetry, highly trained artificial intelligence within a diverse collective defense network, as well as both real-time and retrospective analysis. A two-stage approach that uses AI and “carbon units” (humans) provides optimal protection plus agility to deploy countermeasures autonomously and/or deliberately in order to confuse, and ultimately, deter, motivated adversaries.

7. Is the support able to adapt to your desired security posture and operating model?

Do you want to set up robust but self-sustaining bot mitigation quickly. Do you want to control your security posture but extend your security and fraud teams’ expertise with a trusted advisor? Are you unsure how to proceed yet want to evaluate options and avoid being tied to any particular deployment or operating model?

In all cases, a bot mitigation vendor needs to have your back, ready to jump into the war room when necessary to defend your business from compromise plus abuse.

8. What types of mitigation does the service perform?

The appropriate action could mean silently monitoring the attacker’s canary account or it could mean optimizing authentication for a trusted customer.

If malicious intent is suspected, bot management can transform requests in-transit to deceive attackers through misdirection, limit access to specific application functions, throttle traffic, or even flag demands for follow-up actions and watchlists.

Security teams should be able to apply granular mitigation controls by traffic type, source, and target, and countermeasures should be dynamic and adaptable.

Remember,   effectiveness   is more than  efficacy .

9. Can the vendor use security controls to improve business outcomes?

Organizations may improve company outcomes by employing effective robot mitigation to protect critical apps and APIs. The three important questions: Are you human? Are you currently who you say you are? What is your own intent? By consistently answering these questions for every interaction in the digital journey, you might be well on your way to using security technology to improve business outcomes.

10. Is the merchant battle-tested against sophisticated plus motivated cybercriminals and nation states?

By partnering with the right bot mitigation vendor, you can protect critical applications, regardless of architecture, cloud, or CDN, with effective, easy-to-use, and battle-tested protection.

It makes sense to consider vendors that protect the world’s most valuable brands from the most sophisticated cybercriminals with outcome-based defenses centered on  usefulness .

About the Author

Byron McNaught is Senior Technical Marketing Manager at F5 . F5 is a multi-cloud software services plus security company committed to bringing a better electronic world to life. F5 partners with the world’s largest, most advanced organizations in order to optimize and secure every app plus API anywhere, including on-premises, in the fog up, or at the edge. F5 enables organizations to provide exceptional, secure digital experiences for their customers and continuously stay ahead of threats. For more information, go to f5. com.