Security leaders view bot mitigation as top priority as cybercriminal activity increases: Study

There are concerns among security leaders about the threats bots pose, including site slowdowns caused by overwhelming traffic, new account fraud, credential cracking/brute force attacks, account takeover, content manipulation, sensitive content scraping, and inventory exhaustion and cart abandonment. This is according to HUMAN’s new research (2021 Bot Management Trends) into security leaders’ perceptions of and responses to sophisticated bot attacks.

The survey was conducted during the first quarter of 2021 and collected insights from 425 cybersecurity and IT decision makers with application security knowledge and responsibilities for their organizations.

“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.”

The 2021 Bot Management Trends report supports this fact. Several key findings from the report include:

• Nearly half of respondents believe their organization would be susceptible to a sophisticated bot attack.
• 90% of respondents view bot management as a top-five cybersecurity priority.
• 37% of respondents confirmed that they had been victimized by sophisticated bots in the past twelve months, while another 30% believe they had but couldn’t confirm.
• It takes an average of nine months for victims of bot attacks to regain customer trust.
• 86% of respondents believe most bots are capable of circumventing simple bot mitigation features.

“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,” said John Grady, Senior Analyst at ESG. “This new research explores how application security leaders perceive the threat of bot attacks and what their plans are for combatting them.”