Taking Bad Bots Head On with F5 and AWS
With bad bots now generating 40% of web traffic for most organizations, humans are quickly being outpaced online, with at least one banking instance presented in a recent report by Aite-Novarica Group showing a 10:1 ratio of bad bots to legitimate users. Bad bots can wreak havoc on a business, ranging from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to fraudulent transactions to web scraping attacks that steal data. As bots become more advanced, able to bypass common security controls and evade detection with rapid retooling, security defenses must also evolve.
With so many bad bots, trying to stop them all can be exhausting. Teams that employ manual bot defense techniques can spend more than 10,000 hours a year blocking IP addresses and investigating security incidents, as noted by Forrester. Fortunately, automated bot defense solutions can significantly cut down the manual work required while also reducing the risk of breach or disruption.
F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense uses artificial intelligence (AI) to continuously analyze aggregate data to identify bad bots, even when they rapidly retool. Rich client-side signal collection, combined with AI and input from data scientists, allows F5 to use behavioral analysis to find and stop bad bots while allowing good bots and human traffic to move through your defenses unimpeded. This method offers a near-zero false positive rate and reduces friction for legitimate users by eliminating the need for cumbersome tools like CAPTCHA.
With F5, you can stop the damage from bad bots. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense allows you to:
- Ward off automated attacks in real time
- Prevent account takeovers and fake accounts
- Stop reseller bots and inventory hoarding
- Avert gift card attacks and fraud
Adding F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to your AWS cloud environment means you can use a single bot security solution across your hybrid environment, whether that includes public clouds, content delivery networks (CDNs), private clouds, or on-premises infrastructure. F5 connectors make it easy to deploy across a variety of platforms, APIs, and mobile applications to protect a range of attack surfaces.
Amazon CloudFront CDN users can easily add seamless protection with the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector for Amazon CloudFront. This makes it easy to add bot defense to CloudFront without friction for your customers or your cloud engineering team. The CloudFront Ready integration enables simple and rapid deployment, complementing additional security and platform engineering approaches.
Alternatively, if you use AWS WAF today, you can layer rules from F5 to easily add additional bot protection capabilities. These rulesets are written, curated, and integrated by F5 security specialists.
Stopping Sneaker Bots in Their Tracks
For sneaker retailer VegNonVeg, bots were making it impossible for customers to purchase the company’s products. Their ecommerce infrastructure was built on Amazon CloudFront, which allowed them to quickly scale for the extreme spikes in traffic that would occur with new high-profile sneaker launches. Unfortunately, malicious bots were a big cause of those traffic spikes, instantly purchasing all of the coveted inventory to resell at a heavy markup. The bad bots not only created frustration for VegNonVeg customers, but they also increased infrastructure costs through increased traffic and in-house attempts to stop them.
The company tried CAPTCHA and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to thwart the bot attacks with little success. Adding F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to Amazon CloudFront allowed VegNonVeg to get better visibility into the attacks and to successfully block the malicious traffic. Now, loyal customers can make purchases without interference, and VegNonVeg has reduced its infrastructure costs. Read more about the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector for AWS CloudFront and how VegNonVeg uses F5 and AWS to provide a great customer experience.
Protect your hybrid environment from sophisticated, harmful bots without frustrating your users or adding extra work for your IT teams. To learn more, visit F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense on the AWS Marketplace.