Mitigating bad bots

One of the major challenges of today’s environments is the rising tide of bots, with generative AI driving a new era of the technology.

Bots have been a part of the internet since at least the 1990s but recent technological advancements have swollen their number exponentially. Some of these net dwellers are benign, others are malicious, and some sit somewhere in between.

But no matter what category they fall into, they can all cause problems for businesses. How much of an issue is this for businesses and what can they do to mitigate it?

In this special discussion, in association with Fastly, ITPro’s managing editor Jane McCallion speaks to Marshall Irwin chief information security officer (CISO) at Fastly, to discover more about how organizations can protect themselves from the risks of bots.

Highlights

“Bot traffic is a growing portion of web traffic. In total, I think it takes up about 37% of our traffic overall, a pretty huge number and a growing number, one that continues to grow over time and I think for various reasons, we expect it to continue to grow. Of that portion of traffic, about 80% of that is malicious and then a growing portion of it is driven by AI bots.”

“Traditionally, bot traffic becomes a problem when you're thinking about fraud on your platform sometimes, or things as a CISO I'm very mindful of which is like account takeover attacks that are trying to compromise your users accounts and bots are often used to do that.”

“One challenge, typically for for customers or websites in the media space, is that they're consuming that content, feeding it into their LLM models, and then monetizing that content without any return for the website or media platform. And that's a big problem, it presents an immediate business risk, and it's something that's been in the news. So your bigger media companies are quite mindful in seeing this problem and seeing their revenue and their monetization potential.”

“What CISOs and IT leaders will not be as mindful of are these more recent problems that I've been talking about, this problem of crawling to scrape your inventory and monetize it elsewhere, or the operational problems that these are going to cause and I think that's going to hit a much broader category of industries. It means that a much larger group of CISOs and IT leaders are going to need to be mindful of this outside of these sort of more niche use cases, where I think your leaders in those functions have been working for a long time to try to address this problem.”

Footnotes

• Learn more about Fastly bot management
• Security experts issue warning over the rise of 'gray bot' AI web scrapers
• AI is helping bad bots take over the internet

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