These days, online businesses must grapple with their own version of the replicant dilemma, as they try to make it easy for their human customers to use their sites, while keeping out a new generation of human-like bots.
Bots, of course, are hardly a new phenomenon and have played a pivotal role in shaping the Internet as we know it today.
A good deal of modern bot traffic is malicious.
From using bots for account takeover attacks to Web-scraping activities that extract valuable data without permission and carding attacks where stolen credit card information is tested in bulk, our digital landscape is riddled with nefarious bot activity.
Like your typical dystopian sci-fi flick, tomorrow's bad bots are only growing smarter, stealthier, and more autonomous.
Bots: A Non-Stationary Problem Bot developers have devised several sophisticated techniques to circumvent device fingerprinting technologies, which have become a popular way to authenticate users with minimal friction.
By employing headless browsers, these bots can execute tasks like a standard browser but can be scripted to change their behaviors and profiles, thus bypassing traditional fingerprinting methods.
Advanced bots are also programmed to recognize these static rules and can dynamically adapt their behavior to avoid detection.
If a rules-based solution is designed to flag rapid, repeated requests from the same IP address, a more sophisticated bot might dynamically respond by distributing its requests over a range of IP addresses to avoid triggering a predefined threshold.
We need to approach the bot problem not just with cutting-edge technology; we must also work to incorporate novel methodologies that can accommodate the same cycle of continuous adaptation and learning used by our adversaries.
3 Tips for Creating Effective Feedback Loops Feedback loops that leverage real-time intelligence have quietly become one of the most important engines of innovation in our modern world.
Threat intelligence feedback loops are an increasingly vital tool in the escalating battle against bots.
Disrupt the attacker's feedback loop: Bot operators also rely on their own feedback loops to inform and improve the efficacy of their tools.
Anything that slows down their ability to iterate and improve their bots ultimately diminishes their impact.
Thus, anti-bot platforms will set up honeypots both to deconstruct botter tactics and to ensure they don't receive any useful feedback.
By obscuring the results of a bot's actions, you make it that much harder for an attacker to understand how a defensive system reacts to their activities.
Intelligence must be actionable: While gathering timely bot intelligence is crucial for staying one step ahead of bot operators, it's only half the battle.
For it to become truly useful, intelligence must be actionable and operational to respond appropriately to the latest bot threats.
Given the breakneck velocity at which the bot industry moves, this capability is critical to enabling automated defense systems such as blocking, redirecting, or throttling suspicious traffic.
There's little doubt that bot developers will continue to create more elusive bots that will further blur the line between man and machine.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:05:16 +0000