The Evolution of Botnets
When we think of botnets, we think of those large-scale denial of service (DDoS) attacks that take down an organization’s operations for hours, if not days. However, malicious botnets, or a network of devices (think robots) committing crime on behalf of cybercriminals, have become much easier to identify. As a result, cybercriminals have realized that launching high profile DDoS attacks bring too much attention, and that more insidious methods of compromising accounts and stealing data are required when committing financial crimes. According to the 2019 Data Breach Quickview Security Report, there were more than 7,098 breaches reported in the past year that exposed over 15.1 billion records: most of which were access credentials.
What Happens to the Exposed Accounts?
Malicious actors can take a variety of actions when they gain access to stolen or exposed credentials and accounts. The reason why bot attacks are cleverly targeting user accounts and credentials is because of the large variety of malicious activities that can be performed: from stealing sensitive PII data to causing financial loss to the user and organization.
Fraud and security teams face increasing pressure within their organizations to not only reduce high-friction fraud screening but also add seamless and strong remediation methods when an attack is discovered on user accounts. The end result is a series of market trends that have both large and small organizations alike demanding a solution that can adaptively address all identity protection blind spots while offering an intuitive and frictionless experience for remediated workflows.
Introducing Castle’s Identity-Aware Bot Detection
We're excited to announce that Castle’s identity-aware bot detection product is now part of the Castle Intelligence platform. You can read the press release here.
Getting started with this product is easy! With a few clicks, you will be able to configure policies to block a series of threats related to bots and/or automation, such as fake account creation, credit card stuffing, invitation spam, and more!
In addition to making our bot detection real-time, we are layering in our identity-aware detection to offer rich behavioral analytics in the bot detection score, thus yielding a lower false-positive rate than leading bot detection vendors on the market. By offering context around a user’s identity, we only apply the right security challenges appropriate to the risk of the event. Dynamic security challenges could range from a device check, a multi-factor authentication challenge at a password reset, to a denial of an event when coming from a malicious IP address. This dynamic approach to bot detection optimizes user experience throughout their entire session.
Take a tour of how easy it is to stop bot attacks with Castle:
Security Cannot Compromise the Customer Experience (CX)
As identity breaches rise and consumer tolerance for friction continues to drop, companies are forced to face facts: they need to protect the entire customer experience in a way that is both seamless and secure. Castle recognizes that there is a complex challenge and historically companies lean too heavily either towards security or usability while failing to strike a true balance between the two. They either deploy high friction, in-line defenses that can mitigate a large percentage of fraud and account takeover attempts, or enable better user experience while relying on passive security analysis and offline incident response.
Castle Strikes the Right Balance
Castle allows organizations to bring together security, fraud, and customer experience by giving them the ability to see user risk and exercise control over all account activity. From assessing risk at account creation to verifying user identity at login all the way to requiring strong identity verification at password reset; Castle helps address the risk of botnets committing identity fraud at every stage of the consumer lifecycle. Because many of these defenses are continuous and invisible to end-users, Castle strengthens fraud mitigation and eliminates account takeovers while seamlessly reducing friction for legitimate users.
Interested in finding out more about our new approach to bot detection? Attend our on-demand webinar “Beating Bad Bots” to deep dive into the evolution of bot attacks and how Castle’s new approach can protect your organization.