Bad bots can take down your website, steal customer data, break your APIs, and worse. They can cost your business millions in lost revenue and damage your brand’s reputation. Despite this, most businesses don’t properly protect themselves against bad bot).

According to our 2024 Global Bot Security Report:

• • • Only 4.5% of the domains were fully protected.
    • Nearly 45% of domains failed all tests, despite using bot protection.
    • About 65% of the domains are completely unprotected

Your domain should not be part of those percentages . Especially because it’s entirely possible to protect your business against both basic and sophisticated bot attacks.

In this guide, we will explain what bad bots are, how they can hurt your business, and what you can do to fully protect yourself against these malicious bots. Strap in.

What are bad bots?

Bad bots are automated scripts designed to perform automated tasks with harmful intent. Unlike good bots like search engine crawlers, bad bots are programmed by fraudsters, criminals, and unethical competitors to carry out a wide range of malicious activities.

These malicious bots have become increasingly sophisticated. They can now mimic human behavior to evade detection. They can adapt their tactics. They use residential proxies to mask their origin. Some even use AI and machine learning to look like real users. The DataDome Bot Report discovered that advanced bots were detected less than 5% of the time. This highlights the growing need for advanced bot detection methods.

Types of Bad Bots

• • 1. DDoS Bots: These bots aim to disrupt websites or online services by overwhelming them with traffic from multiple sources. DDoS attacks can range from simple flooding techniques to more complex, multi-vector attacks that target different layers of your network infrastructure.
    2. Account Takeover Bots: Used to gain unauthorized access to user accounts using stolen credentials. Account takeover bots often use sophisticated techniques like credential stuffing or password attacks to break into accounts at scale.
    3. Web Scraping Bots: These bots copy and reuse website content without permission, potentially stealing valuable data or intellectual property. While some scraping can be benign (like price comparison tools), web scraping bots are often designed to steal proprietary company information, pricing strategies, or customer data.
    4. Credential Stuffing Bots: Used to test stolen username and password combinations across multiple websites. Credential stuffing works because many users reuse passwords across different services, making it easier for attackers to gain unauthorized access.
    5. Scalping Bots: Used to buy up limited stock of high-demand items to then resell at inflated prices elsewhere. These bots are especially common in the ticketing industry and in limited-edition product markets. They often result in genuine customers being unable to make purchases.
    6. Ad Fraud Bots: These bots artificially inflate ad impressions or clicks, leading to wasted advertising budgets and skewed campaign metrics. Marketers lose billions of dollars to ad fraud every year, except for the marketers who shield their ads with proper ad protection.

How Bad Bots Impact Your Business

The consequences of bad bot activity are severe and can affect multiple areas of your business.

Performance Issues

Bad bots often come in droves. They can significantly increase your web traffic, which means slower loading traffic and potential server crashes. This affects your customers’ experience and can result in lost sales and damage to your brand’s reputation.

Additionally, the unpredictable nature of bot traffic can make it hard to properly scale your infrastructure. It’s not unusual for a company to spend money upscaling servers to handle bot-inflated traffic. Money that could be spent more productively elsewhere. This was what happened to the retailer Topps before they installed DataDome.

Just the fact that we no longer have to upscale our servers for two-hour spikes of launch activity means that DataDome pays for itself—and that’s without mentioning the time my team is saving.

– Sayed Gaffar, Director of E-Commerce, EMEA, and International Markets

Financial Losses

The impact of bad bots on your bottom line can be substantial and multifaceted: Costs can include fraud losses, customer service expenses, chargebacks, and fines that regulatory frameworks impose on your business for not adequately protecting yourself.

Other costs are more hidden and come in the form of wasted advertising budget due to ad fraud, damaged brand reputation after your website went down once too many times, or even a decline in competitive advantage because your competitors use scraping bots to undercut your prices.

Skewed Analytics

Bot traffic can distort your web analytics, which can lead to misguided business decisions and wasted marketing spend. Bots artificially inflate your website visitor count, interact with your site differently than humans, and distort conversion rates if they are filling out your forms or making purchases.

Additionally, bots can click your ads and drain your advertising budget without it ever resulting in new revenue. This can make some marketing campaigns look much more successful than they actually are. It’s hard to rely on any kind of digital analytics when you have too many bots swarming your websites and mobile apps.

Reputational Damage

Successful bot attacks, particularly those resulting in data breaches or account takeovers, can severely damage customer trust and loyalty. You may be legally required to disclose a breach, which will lead to negative press and loss of customer confidence.

But reputational damage goes beyond that too. Scalper bots can buy up your limited stock and leave real customers empty-handed. Spam bots can post fake reviews that worsen the quality of user-generated content on your website. And too many bots can lead to SEO penalties too. There are many ways in which bots can directly or indirectly lead to reputational damage.

How to Identify Bad Bot Activity

Detecting bad bots isn’t always straightforward, but there are several telltale signs and methods you can use to identify bot activity:

• • 1. Abnormally high pageviews: Sudden spikes in traffic can indicate bot activity. Look for unusual patterns in your analytics, such as a large number of visits to pages that typically receive little traffic.
    2. Unusual bounce rates: Bots often have very high or very low bounce rates compared to human users. A bounce rate close to 100% might indicate bots that are only visiting a single page, while a rate near 0% could suggest bots that are programmed to navigate through multiple pages.
    3. Abnormal session durations: Extremely short (milliseconds) or unusually long sessions can be suspicious. Bots might execute their tasks much faster than a human could, or they might be programmed to stay on the site for extended periods.
    4. Traffic spikes from unexpected locations: A sudden influx of traffic from countries you don’t typically serve could signal bot activity. Be especially careful if this traffic doesn’t align with any international marketing efforts.
    5. Increased failed login attempts: This could indicate credential stuffing or account takeover attempts. Look for patterns in the timing and frequency of these attempts.
    6. Unusual user agent strings: While sophisticated bots can mimic legitimate user agents, less advanced bots could use unusual or outdated user agent strings.
    7. High traffic to non-HTML resources: Bots often target specific resources like APIs or database query URLs. Unusual traffic patterns to these endpoints could indicate bot activity.
    8. Inconsistent behavior patterns: Human users typically follow logical paths through a website. Bots might navigate in ways that don’t make sense for a human user.
    9. Unusual device or browser characteristics: Some bots might report impossible or highly improbable combinations of device characteristics, such as outdated browsers on new operating systems.

How to Protect Your Business from Bad Bots

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for bot protection. You need a comprehensive strategy. Here are some key steps to consider:

Implement Advanced Bot Detection

Traditional methods like blocking IP addresses or using CAPTCHAs are no longer sufficient against today’s sophisticated bots. Look for solutions that use machine learning and behavioral analysis to differentiate between human and bot traffic in real-time.

Advanced bot detection systems should have the following functionality:

• • • Analyze multiple data points per request, including IP information and browser fingerprinting.
    • Use machine learning models that continuously adapt to new bot behaviors.
    • Offer real-time detection and mitigation to minimize the impact of bot attacks.

Conduct Regular Security Audits

Regular security audits are important to identify potential vulnerabilities in your systems and update your protection measures accordingly. Examples could include penetration testing, code reviews to check for software vulnerabilities, and regular updates to your security tools and protocols.

Educate Your Team

Ensure that your staff is aware of the risks posed by bad bots and trained in best practices for cybersecurity. Training should cover recognition of common bot attack patterns, how to properly handle sensitive data, and incident response procedures in case of a successful bot attack.

Implement Strong Authentication Measures

Strengthen your defenses against account takeover attempts with robust authentication methods for both your customers and employees. Examples include enabling multi-factor authentication across user and employee accounts, a powerful CAPTCHA for login attempts, and biometric authentication for high-security applications.

Monitor and Analyze Traffic Patterns

Regularly analyze your traffic patterns to identify anomalies that could indicate bot activity. Set up alerts for sudden traffic spikes or unusual patterns, use log analysis tools to examine suspicious activity, and compare traffic patterns over time to identify long-term trends and potential slow-brute-force attacks.

Always Stay Ahead of the Bot Threat

A robust, AI-powered bot management solution is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity for protecting your websites, mobile apps, and APIs against the silent threat of bad bots. Don’t wait for a bot attack to cripple your operations. Take proactive steps today to secure your digital future.

DataDome is an advanced bot protection solution that provides real-time defense against the most sophisticated bot attacks. It detects and blocks bad bots in real-time and uses machine learning to continuously stay ahead of emerging threats. DataDome is easy to integrate into your existing tech architecture and takes at most a few minutes to set up. Start a free DataDome trial today.