Most businesses aren’t equipped to thwart attacks by sophisticated bots

Bad Bots
(Image credit: Gonin / Shutterstock)

Internet-borne attacks conducted with malicious bots continue to pose a challenge to most organizations, and put a dent in their revenues, according to a new report.

Kasada conducted research showing that 83% of the companies it surveyed admitted experiencing at least one bot attack within the past year.

Furthermore, despite spending millions of dollars on anti-bot systems, 77% reported that the attacks cost them at least 6% of their revenue, with 39% losing 10% or more. On top of that, 63% claimed that it usually takes over a week to remediate a successful bot attack.

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In absolute figures, 44% of the respondents say that on average a single bot attack costs their organizations at least $250,000, with a quarter reported losses totaling $500,000 or more.

Evolving bots

The report also shows that companies spent some serious chunk of change to mitigate bot attacks, with 27% spending in excess of $1 million to ensure their operations aren’t disrupted by bots.

However, despite their best efforts, an overwhelming majority of the respondents (80%) agreed that bots were becoming more sophisticated and difficult for their security tools to detect. 

In fact, less than a third (31%) exhibited confidence in their ability to detect new, never seen before bots, with an even smaller group (15%) reporting that their anti-bot solutions remained effective for more than a year after initial deployment.

Respondents indicate that the most difficult types of bot attacks to stop are credential stuffing, account takeover, web scraping, denial of inventory, CAPTCHA defeat, application DDoS, fake account creation, carding, and cracking. 

“More has changed in the bot ecosystem over the past two years than the prior decade. Today’s organizations need a different approach, one that is proactive and constantly adapting alongside attackers,” asserts Sam Crowther, CEO and founder, Kasada.

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.