A paradigm shift in bot detection
The traditional data used to differentiate between humans and bots can no longer be trusted. This new paradigm creates a major problem for traditional anti-bot providers and their customers who pay handsomely to be protected from bot attacks.
The botting community has mastered the “Know thy enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated” approach.
The key to defeating an anti-bot provider is to understand what data they want to see. Once bot operators understand this, they can construct a bot to deliver that data, exactly as it’s expected.
Sun Tzu would’ve built a wicked botting operation.
So, let’s apply a bit of this logic in the reverse to see what we can discover.
The marketplace for bypasses
The challenge for anti-bot providers is that the botting community is built upon highly innovative, intelligent individuals who continually develop bypasses for most of the established bot detection technologies.
Despite the marketing messaging of the CDNs, browser and TLS fingerprint data, device metrics, and machine learning are no longer effective ways to mitigate sophisticated bots. In reality, the complex machine learning algorithms that power many of the leading anti-bot solutions are actually corrupted with fake data, and therefore, should no longer be trusted.
The limited lifecycle of an anti-bot bypass technique is what drives the continuous innovation cycle within the botting community.
The commercial value of a particular bypass technique is impacted by:
