Is all hope lost?

Sandy Cariella, a Forrester principal analyst and lead author of the Forrester bot report, says a critical element of any bot defense program is to not delay good bots, such as legitimate search engine spiders, in the quest to block bad ones.

“The crux of any bot management system has to be that it never introduces friction for good bots and certainly not for legitimate customers. You need to pay very close attention to customer friction,” Cariella says. “If you piss off your human customers, you will not last.”

Some of the better bot defense programs today use deep learning to sniff out deceptive bot behavior. Although some question whether such programs can stop attacks — such as bot DDoS attacks — quickly enough, Cariella believes the better apps are playing a larger game. They may not halt the first wave of a bot attack, but they are generally effective at identifying attacking bots’ characteristics and stopping subsequent waves, which often happen within minutes of the first attack, she says.

“They are designed to stop the entire attack, not just the first foray. [The enterprise] is going to be able to continue doing business,” Cariella says.