Using the internet is essential to any modern business. Whether you have an e-commerce website or utilize the internet to increase revenue and brand awareness, you must have noticed the rise in fraudsters online.
However, it’s not just con artists and scammers that plague the internet. Now, they can create multiple bots that do it for them around the clock. Ignoring the rising issue of bots or not being prepared to combat them will not only compromise your business’s information and user security, but it can affect your website’s analytics and get you in legal trouble because of false data.
Luckily, there are ways you can detect bots as soon as they reach your website. You can stop them from causing any damage early on instead of dealing with the aftermath of a successful infestation.
Identify IP Addresses
Every internet user, whether a real person or a bot, has an IP address. But while people have separate IP addresses that they browse the internet from, several bots can use the same IP address, making them easier to stop and block.
Keep track of your website’s data traffic and analytics. If you notice multiple visits or login attempts back to back from the same handful of IP addresses, it’s a good chance you’re dealing with a bot. By blocking this particular IP address, either permanently or temporarily, you can prevent dozens of bots from accessing your website.
Validate Contact Information
With technology and artificial intelligence continually evolving, it’s becoming harder to detect and block all bots. You may need an additional measure to ensure all data you gather for your website’s users is authentic and consensual. You can do this by implementing contact information validation, which can spot fake or inauthentic information that bots often submit.
There are a variety of tools you can embed into your online forms to ensure only the most trusted data gets through. For example, one of the most troublesome data types that could hinder your marketing and support teams is phone numbers. You can implement contact form API for phone validation to detect and intercept fake phone numbers from reaching your database, limiting fraudulent and bot activity.
Additionally, you need to look out for fake email addresses, especially if you have a regular mailing list. Fake email addresses can build up in your email list, messing with your data and analytics, making it harder to get accurate receive and open rates of email campaigns.
Implement CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Most bots online can’t pass low-level CAPTCHAs while only taking a human user less than five seconds to pass.
However, be mindful of where you embed CAPTCHAs and their level of complexities as they inconvenience genuine users. Implement more complex CAPTCHAs before sensitive operations and pages—such as payments—but use more straightforward sign-up and login pages. You can then use data of failed CAPTCHA attempts and flag them out as bots.
Monitor Failed Logins Attempts
In addition to sabotaging online forms, bots often try to log in whenever a website has a login feature. After all, a single successful login could reveal vital company information through the user account.
Another way to tell if bots visited your website is by analyzing your website’s traffic. Look for any frequent failed login attempts and block their IP address. Although, it’s best to block failed login attempts IP addresses temporarily, especially if your website allows customers to sign up for accounts, as they might be having an issue logging in.
Look out for Account Creation Spikes
In order to gain easy access to additional features of your website, some bots might create their own user accounts. While a constant flow of new accounts is a sign of a healthy business website, stay on the lookout for account creation spikes out of nowhere—not after a new promotional campaign or product release.
If you notice an unjustifiable spike in account creation accompanied by IP address redundancies, you might want to track the IP addresses back to their origin. Otherwise, you might end up having to do a site-wide account purge to get rid of bot accounts, which is much more laborious and more time-consuming than prevention.
Keeping up With the Latest Developments
Bots can be anything from inconvenient to downright harmful to your online business and website. To limit harmful bot behavior, you need to take the necessary precautions that correlate to the degree of urgency.
However, bots today are more advanced than bots just a few years ago and are smart enough to bypass most anti-bot measures. It would be best to keep up with the latest development regarding bot technology and prevention methods alike.
