Bot Management: Keeping Your Website Safe from Disturbances

This article will provide a detailed introduction to what bot management is and the potential harm that bot access can cause to websites.

Finally, we will also introduce some effective means to manage bot access.

What is Bot Access

Bot access refers to automated programs (bots) accessing websites, applications, or online services over the internet. Bot access can take various forms and serve different purposes.

Of course, not all bot access is harmful; there are also beneficial bots, such as Google's indexing bots.

Bot management involves detecting, classifying, monitoring, and managing the activity of automated programs through various technologies and strategies.

What Harm Can Bot Access Do to a Website

Developers who have built their own websites and have a certain amount of traffic are likely to have dealt with bot access. Although the problems faced by each developer may vary, here are some common issues caused by bot access.

Abnormal Traffic and Performance Degradation

If your website typically sees only a few thousand visits per day, you only need to allocate server resources accordingly.

However, when a large number of bots start accessing your website, daily visits can quickly surge to hundreds of thousands.

Due to excessive bot access causing network congestion, your users will noticeably experience a decline in website performance.

At this point, you may have to invest more server resources to cope with the situation. Undoubtedly, bot access invisibly increases the maintenance costs of your website.

This is the most troublesome aspect of bot access for most developers. Bots like ticket snipers and monitoring bots are the most common types of bot access.

These bots use high-frequency scripts to monitor websites or grab resources from them.

Abnormal Website Data Statistics

In addition, developers often perform data analytics on their websites, such as tracking click-through rates, bounce rates, and visit durations to optimize website structure and content.

However, when analyzing user behavior, bot access can generate data significantly different from regular user visits, such as extremely low session durations and decreased click-through rates. If developers fail to effectively limit bot access, the data recorded can quickly become corrupted.

Often, data analysts need to exclude the influence of bot access in order to accurately identify and resolve issues with the product or website.

Website Content Protection and User Information Protection

Most developers realize the need for bot management not just because of the aforementioned reasons, but because they discover that their website's content has been plagiarized, often with the plagiarism showing better access statistics than their own. This is understandably frustrating.

When a site is a content-oriented site, such as that displaying e-books, images, or videos, you may find that identical content quickly appears across the internet.

These pirated contents spread at an alarming rate. Despite legal regulations, content theft is rampant.

More alarmingly, malicious bots can scrape user information from your site, giving competitors quick access to your user base. This not only harms your product but can also lead to user data breaches.

How to Identify and Block Bot Access

First, it's important to understand that blocking bot access means blocking malicious bot access. Some bot access is beneficial, like Google crawlers that analyze your site and increase its exposure.

This distinction is critical when setting up your blocking strategy; otherwise, your site's traffic may rapidly decline.

Blocking bot access starts with identifying the type of bot access. Malicious bots can be broadly categorized into the following types:

1. Identity Masquerading Bots: Designed to bypass security protections and perform malicious actions, such as DDoS attacks, spam posts, and brute-force login attempts.
2. Content Scraping Bots (for illegal purposes): Illegally scrape website content, leading to intellectual property infringement and data leakage. This includes pirated sites scraping e-books, images, or video content.
3. Account Hijacking Bots: Use credential stuffing techniques for illegal login attempts to hijack user accounts. These bots leverage leaked usernames and passwords for large-scale login attempts.
4. Ad Click Bots: Used to click ads to fraudulently increase click-through rates for ad revenue or deplete a competitor's ad budget.
5. Spy Bots: Designed to gather competitive intelligence, such as website information, pricing, and user data for commercial espionage.
6. Spam Bots: Automatically send a large volume of spam emails, comments or submit spam through contact forms, affecting user experience and server performance.

Traditional blocking methods include analyzing User-Agent, IP address locations, access behavior (like access frequency and click streams), and device fingerprinting.

Overall, these methods aim to detect whether the access request contains bot information or to judge based on unusual behavior. For instance, making 10 requests per second is clearly beyond human capabilities.

These methods provide basic blocking functionality, but because malicious bots can disguise themselves, traditional methods sometimes struggle to identify them.

Thus, the most effective contemporary blocking method is leveraging AI technology. By analyzing bot characteristics and training regression or classification models, it is possible to more accurately determine whether a request originates from a bot.

Additionally, you can use commercial security solutions such as EdgeOne. These providers have comprehensive threat intelligence and sophisticated recognition models capable of quickly identifying bot access, allowing developers to focus more on product development.

Other solutions include Cloudflare's CAPTCHA services. Depending on the security level, different degrees of verification can be implemented, such as dynamic facial recognition for financial transactions or click-based verification for site protection. Through rational design and implementation, malicious activities can be effectively prevented, safeguarding user interests and system security.