Protect your business from bot and agent abuse

Bot detection is the process of identifying automated traffic across web, mobile, and API endpoints using application telemetry and API signals like behavior, device fingerprinting, and network reputation to stop malicious automation. Distinguishing "good bots" from "bad bots" is often a moving target, varying per industry and business. Continuous signal gathering and intent analysis is needed to fully address the problem.

Bot management, also sometimes referred to as bot protection, combines bot detection and bot mitigation techniques such as explicit block, step-up authentication, dynamic rate limits, or bot challenges while still allowing legitimate users and approved bots like search crawlers or trusted partner integrations.

Business logic abuse protection prevents automated abuse that targets how an application works, primarily through APIs. Frequently targeted functions include login, password resets, change password, account signups, checkout, search, and digital promotion API flows. Attackers exploit APIs and API flows even when no traditional vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are present, making business logic abuse protection crucial.

Bots perpetuate account takeover by automating techniques like credential stuffing, password spraying, and bruteforcing at scale. Attackers often use stolen credentials harvested from other breaches, or use social media data as a starting point. Bots and attacker automations also rotate IPs to evade traditional security controls like IP address block lists and static rate limits.

Credential stuffing is an automated abuse technique that targets login flows using leaked or breached authentication material, typically username (or email) and password pairs, across sites. Stopping credential stuffing typically requires bot detection, anomaly-based login protection, and step-up authentication for high-risk or privileged sessions.

CAPTCHAs alone are not enough because advanced bots and attackers can bypass CAPTCHAs, outsource CAPTCHA solving to human services, or mimic real user behavior. CAPTCHAs can damage user experience if not implemented properly, or they rely on client fingerprinting and tracking that raises privacy concerns. Effective bot protection uses layered detection and adaptive mitigation to preserve user experience and still combat bots and abuse.

API bot and abuse protection pairs API abuse detection with rate limiting, token integrity, anomaly detection, intent analysis, and automated attack fingerprinting to stop scraping, credential attacks, transaction fraud, and high-volume API abuse.

Reducing false positives requires accurate classification of "good" bots vs "bad" bots, tuning protection policies by API endpoint, and using adaptive bot mitigations so legitimate users aren't blocked during normal traffic spikes such as market seasonality or product launches. Organizations may also prefer ROI or fraud measurements beyond traditional false-positive metrics, such as transaction fraud rates, chargeback percentages, infrastructure costs, conversion rates, and support incident rates.

Web scraping is automated data extraction from websites and APIs that serve data. Scraping prevention uses bot detection, intent analysis, and adaptive challenges to block undesirable scraping while still allowing legitimate access such as search engine crawling, AI/LLM crawling, or trusted partner automations. Organizations in specific industries or regions may also want to block even these legitimate use cases to preserve intellectual property or privacy.

Agentic AI systems autonomously browse, scrape, and call APIs on behalf of users, blurring the lines between human and authorized automation. AI agents can scrape proprietary content at scale, exhaust API quotas, manipulate pricing or inventory, and bypass traditional bot signals because they often use real browsers and rotating identities. Modern bot and abuse protection must classify agentic traffic by intent and origin, enforce policies that distinguish sanctioned AI partners from unauthorized agents, and provide controls that let organizations decide which AI traffic to allow, throttle, or block.