3 Bot Attack Prevention Strategies to Stop Bots on Your Website

Many companies claim they can stop malicious bots, but can they really deliver? The hard truth is that most anti-bot solutions can’t keep up with today’s advanced threats.

Modern bots are getting incredibly sophisticated. They use proxy networks, headless browsers, and automation tools to mimic real human behavior.

Legacy detection tools often fail to spot them. And by the time they do, the damage is already done — whether it’s a carding attack, fake account creation, or stolen inventory.

As a company providing website development services, we’ve seen firsthand how damaging malicious bot traffic can be.

In this guide, we’ll break down:

• Why outdated bot management tools are no longer effective
• Which anti-bot techniques still work, and which ones you should retire
• How KYC checks fit in, and what else you need to truly block bad bots

Wondering how long it will take to launch? Check out the average time to create a website for a realistic timeline.

Let’s dig in and talk about how you can get one step ahead of those pesky bots. Game on!

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What Are Bot Attacks and How Do They Work?

Bot attacks happen when automated scripts, or “bots”, are used to perform harmful or fraudulent activities on websites, apps, or online services. Unlike helpful bots (like Google’s search engine crawler that indexes websites), these malicious bots are built to steal data, disrupt service, or exploit your business for profit.

In 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) defended against the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, peaking at 2.3 terabits per second. While AWS managed it, smaller businesses often don’t have those resources and suffer costly downtime.

Types of Bot Attacks

Here are the most widespread types of automated bot attacks and how they work:

Type of bot attack	How it works	Impact on business
Credential stuffing	Bots use stolen login details to access user accounts	Account takeovers, fraud, loss of customer trust
DDoS (Denial of service)	Bots flood servers with traffic to crash or slow down the website	Website downtime, lost sales, damage to brand reputation
Web scraping	Bots harvest pricing, content, or customer data from websites	Competitive data theft, loss of SEO rankings
Scalping / inventory hoarding	Bots quickly buy out limited products to resell at higher prices	Lost sales to real customers, brand damage
Ad fraud (click bots)	Bots generate fake clicks or views on paid ads	Wasted ad spend, distorted campaign metrics
Carding attacks	Bots test stolen credit card numbers to find valid ones	Fraudulent transactions, chargebacks, and payment gateway issues
Fake account creation	Bots sign up for accounts en masse	Spam, abuse of free trials, and damage to user analytics
Spamming bots	Bad bot traffic is used to post unwanted content in forms, comments, or forums	Damaged user experience, SEO penalties

How to Detect Bot Traffic?

If your website traffic seems off, like sudden spikes in activity or unusual browsing patterns, there’s a good chance you’re dealing with bot traffic. And not the harmless kind. We’re talking about non-human traffic driven by automated attacks that can skew your analytics, slow down your site, and even put your data at risk.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. They Don’t Act Like Humans

Real users browse casually. Bots don’t. They zoom through pages, click way too fast, or fill out forms in less than a second. These unnatural behaviors are red flags that automated scripts, not people, are behind the screen.

2. They Leave Clues in Every Request

Every time someone visits your site, their browser sends little pieces of information, called headers. Bad bots often skip these or use outdated ones. You might also see traffic from strange IP addresses or places that don’t match your customer base. That’s another clue.

3. They Show Up in Big Waves

If you suddenly get thousands of logins, sign-ups, or product searches in seconds, it’s probably not because you went viral. More likely, it’s a brute force attack trying to break in or grab your data.

4. They Struggle to Fake Real Devices

Even when bots try to act human, things don’t add up. Their browser, device, and screen info often looks fake or too perfect. Tools can catch these tiny inconsistencies using what’s called device fingerprinting.

5. They’re Often Already on the Radar

Many bots come from known sources. Security platforms track and update lists of IPs and bot patterns so you can block malicious traffic in real time, before it even reaches your website.

Why Bot Management Matters

Before examining today’s bot management solutions and their effectiveness, we need to understand why these tools are crucial to begin with.

Malicious Bot Traffic Drags Down Conversion Rates

Did you know that one in 10 users will not return to your website if they have a poor user experience?

Malicious bots can cause exactly that. When bots flood your site, they slow it down, overwhelm servers, and create barriers for real customers trying to browse or make a purchase. This leads to frustration and lost sales.

Even worse, many bot management tools try to stop this with CAPTCHAs. While they block bot traffic, they also frustrate real users. Clicking through endless images of traffic lights or bicycles can make the buying process feel tedious. In some cases, customers abandon their carts altogether.

That’s why a smart, user-friendly bot management solution is essential. It should block harmful traffic without getting in the way of your real customers, so you can protect conversions, not push them away.

Bots Can Blast Huge Holes in Your Budget

Every time you pay to serve ads, run campaigns, or maintain your site infrastructure, you expect real people to engage. But if a significant portion of your traffic comes from bots, you’re burning money on visitors who will never convert, never buy, and never interact in a meaningful way.

Malicious bots can drain your budget in several ways, by clicking on paid ads, scraping your content, hoarding inventory, or overwhelming your systems. And the costs add up fast.

Even short periods of downtime caused by bot-driven attacks like DDoS can be devastating. In fact, the average cost of downtime ranges from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour, depending on the business.

While some bot protection tools on the market are pricey and complex to implement, not having any solution can be far more expensive.

That’s why you need an effective, efficient bot management system, one that protects your bottom line without creating new problems.

Bots Hurt Everyone – Fight the Good Fight!

As you can see, bad bots can cause frustration amongst your customers and everyone on your team.

Costing a lot of money and ruining the consumer experience, it is not difficult to see why businesses need to prioritize bot management.

They slow down site performance, frustrate legitimate users, and ruin the customer journey. Real people face slow load times, out-of-stock products due to inventory hoarding bots, and annoying CAPTCHAs, all of which lead to cart abandonment and lost revenue.

Behind the scenes, your team feels the pressure too. Bots inflate analytics, making it hard to track real user behavior. They skew marketing data, waste ad budgets, and overwhelm customer service with malicious bot activity.

The financial impact is serious. From wasted marketing spend to increased server costs and potential security risks, bots can quietly drain your resources without any return.

That’s why bot management is essential. To protect your legitimate users, your team, and your bottom line, you need a proactive, intelligent solution that stops malicious bots without interrupting real customer interactions.

Legacy Bot Solutions: Where They Fail

Many bot management tools on the market today were built for an earlier era of the internet. But bots have evolved fast. Let’s break down where traditional solutions fail and what that means for your business.

1. They React to Problems Instead of Preventing Them

Legacy systems often rely on analyzing past behavior to detect bots. This means they only act after unusual activity is recorded—when bots have already scraped your data, drained your inventory, or abused your login system.

But bots move fast. If your solution isn’t working in real-time, you’re always playing catch-up.

2. CAPTCHA Is a UX Nightmare, And Bots Can Beat It

CAPTCHAs were once a simple way to separate humans from bots. But today’s bots use advanced tools that can:

• Automatically solve CAPTCHA challenges
• Use human CAPTCHA-solving farms for a few cents per thousand tests
• Simulate human-like browsing behavior

Even worse, real users are paying the price. Think of a customer trying to buy a concert ticket, only to be slowed down by a CAPTCHA puzzle, while bots are completing hundreds of checkouts in the background.

This kind of friction leads to abandoned purchases, lower conversion rates, and frustration.

3. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) Are Too Rigid

WAFs were designed to block known security threats, not modern bots that change tactics constantly. Bots today:

• Rotate IPs
• Mimic real user agents and session behaviors
• Bypass rule-based systems with ease

WAFs rely heavily on pre-defined rules, which makes them easy to evade and hard to maintain. And when those rules are too aggressive? They block real, legitimate users.

4. Bots Are No Longer Simple Scripts

Today’s bots act like real people. They:

• Use full browsers (headless Chrome)
• Navigate websites like users
• Perform account takeovers, scalping, ad fraud, and more
  These aren’t the noisy, obvious bots of the past. They’re quiet, persistent, and nearly indistinguishable from human traffic, unless you’re using tech designed specifically to detect them.

Bot Management That Actually Works

There are companies that offer an effective and simple bot detection and mitigation solution.

They will protect your business from the damaging and often underestimated impact of malicious automation across your web, APIs, and mobile.

Bots are just one of the many types of privacy threats that your business should keep a close eye on to protect its sensitive data

Look for a cloud-based service, as well as immersive, embedded, 24/7 customer support, ensuring there is no extra maintenance burden on your internal team.

There are three key areas when it comes to an effective bot management solution: client interrogation, mitigative actions, and threat intelligence.

We will explain more about each one below so you can get a better understanding of what makes some solutions better than other solutions on the market:

1. Client Interrogations

Make sure the solution you select will inspect every client request for any immutable evidence of automation that will be left behind when a bot interacts with any of your applications.

All of this is done without having a negative impact on the user, as the client inspection process is entirely invisible to any human user.

During this phase, they will look for the likes of headless architecture browsers and automation frameworks.

They will use inference to figure out whether the request has come from a bad bot or whether it is simply from a human or even a good bot.

They can do all of this without having to let any requests in.

As mentioned earlier, one of the issues with a lot of the solutions out there today is that they need to let requests in so that they can analyze them.

By this point, it is too late, and the damage has already been done.

The best companies also use their polymorphic method to obfuscate our sensors, ensuring that any reverse engineering attempts are deterred.

2. Mitigative Actions

Next, we move on to mitigative actions.

Earlier, we mentioned how a lot of companies use CAPTCHAs, which make the human user do all of the work, causing a huge amount of frustration.

Well, instead, they should implement cryptographic challenges on the bot side.

This means that clients need to figure out increasingly difficult asymmetric cryptographic tasks as proof of work.

The best have designed their solution so that the bots have to do all of the work.

Designed to deceive bot operators while making sure that bot attacks are simply too costly to conduct at scale, a modern solution will prevent bot attacks not only now but also in the future.

They also fight automation with automation.

This means that launching a bot attack on your business would exhaust computer resources and be incredibly expensive.

This will prevent the hacker from ever wanting to target your business again, as they will know that it is simply not worth it.

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3. Threat Intel

Another important part of a modern service is threat intelligence.

Threat intelligence involves deeply assessing any traffic patterns and adversarial techniques.

Companies do this by automatically evaluating any sensor or request data.

KYC software checks can also fall into this space. It can assist with identity verification digitally and secure information.

Any findings or learnings will then be added to the client inspection process in real-time, without there being any need for code upgrades.

This means that you are going to be able to benefit from continual feedback and instant updates to your defense.

Want your website to wow visitors? Learn how to make an interactive website that keeps users engaged.

Outsmart Bots With Custom Security Solutions

Staying ahead of sneaky bots takes hard work – you need to keep tabs on the latest tricks and have a flexible defense plan.

Our team of experts can reinforce vulnerabilities and implement intelligent bot management solutions tailored to your site.

Contact us today to review bot risks and forge an ironclad strategy. We’ll assess your setup, find gaps bots can exploit, and create a robust defense plan using intelligent techniques.

Wondering, do I need a website for my business? Find out why the answer is almost always yes.