Bots can be a threat to businesses, as they can easily steal data and leave your website vulnerable to hackers. This is why it is essential to detect bots. Detecting them can save you money and time in the long run.
How can you tell a bot from an IP address?
The best way to detect bots is to create thresholds and monitor them over time. These thresholds are based on patterns and behavior. In most cases, you can spot a bad bot before it reaches the threshold.
If you see a suspicious behavior, it is best to block the user. You can do this by contacting your IT department or submitting a complaint.
Another way to detect bots is to look at the traffic patterns on your website. The pattern should be consistent, and the activity should not be sporadic. If your site experiences a sudden spike in single page visits or rapid page reloads, this may be an indication that your site is under attack.
Aside from the traffic patterns, you can also detect bots by looking at your server logs. Server logs can reveal if a particular IP address is hitting your site more than 100 times per day, which is a clear sign of automated traffic.
Alternatively, you can use fingerprinting to identify bots. Fingerprinting involves collecting identifiable information from a website and sending it to your server. Some of the data collected includes the OS and browser. However, bots often obfuscate the script.
Using AI-driven machine learning, you can identify patterns in traffic patterns that could be indicative of bad bot activity. Fourth-generation bots, for example, mimic human movements, and you can usually detect them by identifying the smallest amounts of non-random movement.