Advanced bots, human click farms, fraud-as-a-service, 24x7 support services, and sharing expertise in the cybercrime ecosystem are enabling even an amateur attacker to graduate into a pro in no time. Businesses, on the other hand, are still stuck in a cat-and-mouse game, as attackers are becoming more adept at bypassing detection.
One of the biggest reasons why attackers are able to circumvent defenses is lack of powerful detection capabilities right at the start of the consumer journey. Thanks to rapid advancements in image recognition software, bots can easily beat reCAPTCHA challenges. Today’s intelligent bots can mimic human behavior, allowing them to fool defense mechanisms that only need basic human interaction, and pass on the attack baton to human attackers when deterred. In the process, user experience gets degraded and the risk to consumer data increases.
Bots can easily bypass reCAPTCHA
While CAPTCHA stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, it’s failing in its fundamental objective – telling bots from humans. Even with longer and repeated challenges, bots go undetected while legitimate consumers face unnecessary friction and frustration. Further, reCAPTCHA uses Google cookies to ascertain whether a user is a bot or human. Therefore, consumers who are not Google users or uncomfortable using Google products must share their data, which leads to data privacy concerns.
In reCAPTCHA Enterprise, the risk assessment of incoming users allows admins only four action options: ask the user to solve a reCAPTCHA v2 challenge to test if they are human, hard block a user, enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA), or let the user access the requested resource. Choosing to challenge the user with a reCAPTCHA is of no use, as bots can easily defeat these same old challenges. The other options are undesirable as they either result in unnecessary friction for good consumers, are expensive (especially MFA), or allow attackers unhindered access to resources. Plus, it burdens application security teams with the need to assess risk and take action.
Making timely, accurate risk decisions is more important than ever before
Businesses are spending money two ways – investing in bot detection and financial losses due to subpar protection. For effective bot prevention, they need risk decisioning that is fast and accurate. This speed and accuracy is possible only when businesses are confident of the efficacy of the risk models they use and the information shared by bot and attack detection tools. In the absence of such confidence, security teams end up performing more manual reviews, which can lead to resource constraints, downstream banning and an adverse impact on genuine consumers. It can also lead to bad actors sneaking past and not being identified well after the malicious activities causing loss of sales and stunted business growth due to false positives.
Businesses, therefore, need powerful and smarter detection – at the start of the consumer journey – to be able to catch attacks faster, reduce false positives and false negatives, and determine the most effective response to sabotage attackers’ efforts.
Arkose Labs’ defense-in-depth approach dramatically improves protection against automated threats with AI-powered attack response that adapts with evolving attacks. Using our proprietary detection engine, we provide app security teams with smarter detection for long-term attack deterrence which empowers them to confidently detect and stop attacks.
The right data can make all the difference
Efficient decision-making is so important in today’s cyberthreat landscape where intelligent bots are wreaking havoc on businesses, yet many businesses get little to no visibility out of limited signals with Google reCAPTCHA. Basic machine learning models, lack of device spoofing abilities, absence of distributed crawler detection, no truth data or real-time logging among many other lacking features, limit reCAPTCHA’s abilities to spot fraudulent activity, especially when attackers are becoming more adept at manipulating risk signals. Security teams need more than just a probabilistic risk score with few data points to understand why a session was scored risky or not and what anomalies were found. For effective and smarter decisioning, risk scores should correlate device, IP, and behavioral insights to catch the subtle signs of bad actors with the transparency to pinpoint findings that can be analyzed and ingested in risk models.
The Arkose Bot Manager platform has a transparent detection engine that focuses on delivering raw risk signals with a clear path to remediation. With actionable risk intelligence, a behavioral analytics layer, machine learning, and human touch for analysis and oversight, it provides businesses with smarter detection to catch even the most advanced attacks coming to their platforms.
Arkose Bot Manager features more than 70 raw risk signals and over 150 in-built insights, and leverages the advantage of Arkose Labs Global Network™ to make it easy for digital businesses to detect and stop attacks. It uses rate limiting, IP and device intelligence, traffic shaping, behavioral biometrics, and invisible assessments to make risk-based decisions and inform a targeted response, which helps improve customer experience.
Intuitive dashboards empower security professionals to locate the insights they need and make it easier to engage and interact with granular data. This data availability provides end-to-end visibility into risk classification, attack patterns, and session details on each workflow. Enhanced visibility empowers businesses to unearth bad actors from among genuine consumers.
Backed by 24/7 analysis from our Security Operations Center (SOC), Arkose Bot Manager helps businesses classify risks in real-time and help security teams thwart large-scale, persistent attacks. To further enhance decisioning with insights unique to a particular business, our open API platform interoperates with third-party risk classification, common attack patterns, and other identity solutions.
With the ability to accurately tell attackers from genuine consumers, quickly adapt to the evolving bot and human-driven attacks, and make more confident response decisions, Arkose Bot Manager is fast becoming the detection solution of choice. Owing to these smarter detection capabilities, our customers have rated us a phenomenal 4.9 out of 5 in Bot Detection and Mitigation on G2.
To learn more about our transparent and smarter detection solution, book a demo today.
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