Pros and Cons of building an internal team to stop bots

The website and mobile applications are the biggest revenue generating fronts for your online business model. And, you know they have to be protected. There are several Web Application Firewalls in the market, that can protect your website from DDoS attacks and XSS vulnerabilities. However, the online businesses of today face challenges from many other quarters. For example, you may not even know that the content you publish on your website is being stolen and posted elsewhere, impacting your SEO. You may be unaware that your competitors are scraping your pricing and product catalog information.

Stopping bot threats - making the right choice

Bots are of two types, good and bad. You don’t want to stop the good bots, for obvious reasons. Good bots like search engine bots, social network bots and aggregator bots bring the much-needed visibility to your website. And, bad bots sent by third-party scrapers and your competitors, steal your content, scrape your prices, increase page load times, create unwanted pageviews, skew analytics, spam your web forms (comment / forums / lead capture forms) and create a bad user experience.

So, how do you check the invasion of bad bot traffic on your website or mobile application? For that, it is essential to know, how to identify the bot traffic coming to your website. This can be accomplished with either of the two methods:

• In-house bot prevention team
• Dedicated bot prevention solution

In-house bot prevention teams are set up over time. They are constantly on the lookout for anomalous behavior on the website, which is investigated and traced to the type of bot activity. However, there are a number of limitations to an in-house bot prevention system, as the bots become sophisticated day-by-day and break the in-house defenses put in place.

The following table shows how in-house bot prevention teams hold up against anti-bot activities:

Anti-bot activities	In-house bot prevention team	Radware Bot Manager's bot prevention
Effort	Manual	Automated
Effectiveness	False positives/negatives	Zero false-positives
Response time	Delayed	Real-time
Bot detection accuracy	Hit or miss	Accurate
Bot classification	Laborious	Instantaneous
Bot activity audit	Manual dashboards	Real-time dashboard
Bot prevention	Manual, IP blacklists	Real-time, based on finger-print & incremental bot signature database
Ease of use/learning curve	Need to factor in team attrition and training time	Intuitive to use
Detecting advanced/sophisticated bots	Laborious, difficult and easy to miss. Playing catch-up with advanced scraper bots	State-of-the-art algorithms to detect changing bot behavior
Data science expertise	Not applicable	Machine-learning + human intelligence for varying bot behavior
Cost	Low startup costs, but will become unpredictable over time	Predictable, recurring costs based on monthly pageviews
ROI	Fuzzy	Easy to measure and realize the benefits from day one

Relying on experts to handle the bot issues is the best way to curb the bot problem. Dedicated bot prevention solution will ensure that you are 24/7 protected against bots without having to build and maintain an exclusive In-house bot prevention team which typically would cost you more and be less efficient in combating against bots.