Bot attacks are a major threat and many business owners are fearful of the consequences, a new report from cybersecurity firm HUMAN claims.
Based on a poll of 425 cybersecurity and IT decision-makers with application security knowledge and responsibilities for their organizations, the report claims nearly half believe their company is susceptible to a sophisticated bot attack.
Almost all (90 percent) see bot management as a top-five cybersecurity priority and a significant majority (86 percent) think bots are capable of working around their mitigation solutions.
More than a third (37 percent) admitted to falling victim to a bot attack in the last year. This figure could likely be even higher, as another 30 percent said it was possible they had suffered an attack of this kind.
According to HUMAN, these attacks are damaging to an organization’s image; the report suggests it takes an average of nine months for victims to regain customer trust.
There are many ways in which bots can wreak havoc on a business: site slowdowns caused by overwhelming traffic, new account fraud, credential cracking/brute force attacks, account takeover, content manipulation, sensitive content scraping and more.
“This research demonstrates how crucial a robust bot mitigation platform is to a strong cybersecurity posture,” said Tamer Hassan, co-founder and CEO of HUMAN. “Sophisticated bots can have immense detrimental effects to customer experience, and the time it takes to rebuild trust with customers is time that today’s organizations don’t have.”
“As organizations have shifted to more online-focused business operations, a trend further accelerated by the pandemic, attackers have doubled down on their efforts and increased the frequency of bot-driven fraud and logic abuse,” added John Grady, Senior Analyst at ESG.
