How to Stop Unauthorized Bots From Harvesting Your Business’s Sensitive Data

Unauthorized bots pose a serious - and growing - risk to businesses. The havoc they can wreak includes the ability to potentially harvest sensitive or proprietary data, which could significantly impact your enterprise’s operations, finances, and reputation. But there are effective steps a business can take to stop unauthorized bots in their tracks, such as deploying bot management software, blocking suspicious traffic, and implementing rate limiting.

How to Spot Bot Traffic

There are some tell-tale signs of potentially problematic bot traffic. These include an unusually high amount of traffic from a single IP address, requests from multiple IP addresses with similar user agents, and server logs with suspicious activities. Other suspicious activities to watch out for are rapid form submissions, mouse movements, excessive page view visits and requests, and uncommonly used operating systems or browsers. If you spot any of these things happening, you could be vulnerable to a bot attack.

Use Bot Management Software

Plenty of bot management software solutions as Datadome are available to protect your business from bad bots while allowing access to the good ones, such as SEO tools. While many solutions used to rely on CAPTCHA to differentiate between helpful bots and malicious agents, this is now less effective as bots have become so much more sophisticated. To this end, businesses should look for bot management software able to consistently identify anomalies and take the appropriate action, and that uses machine learning to adapt to emerging threats and patterns in real time. The software should also deploy both behavior-based and fingerprinting approaches to distinguish between bots and human users.

Block Suspicious Traffic

As part of your business’s general cybersecurity practices, you should also consider proactively blocking suspicious traffic to guard against unauthorized bots. IP address filtering can prevent bots from accessing and harvesting sensitive data or otherwise disrupting services. Web application firewalls (WAFs) can also be used to defend against automated attacks.

Implement Rate Limiting

Another easy but effective way to stop bad bots in their tracks is to implement rate limiting on your business’s website. This restricts the number of requests a single user, bot, or IP address can make within a set time frame.

In addition to challenging or blocking suspicious users or bots that exceed the specified threshold, rate-limiting measures prevent malicious agents from quickly extracting a huge amount of sensitive or proprietary data from your site. As a bonus, rate-limiting measures enhance security against brute-force attacks, protect bandwidth, and reduce website load.