Today cybersecurity provider ZENEDGE announced their next-generation bot management platform, which will now use behavioral analysis and device fingerprinting to identify and block attacks from increasingly sophisticated bots.
The new platform builds on their current bot mitigation abilities, which distinguish bad bots from web search crawlers, media, trading, and other authorized bots as well as protect against web and data scraping through IP rate limiting, CAPTCHA protection and JavaScript Challenges. However, as malicious bots learn to bypass these security challenges and behave in increasingly human-like ways, bot mitigation techniques like these are not sufficient to offer widespread protection.
Laurent Gil, the co-founder of ZENEDGE, said in our interview with him today, “There are two school of bot management: the traditional method and the behavioral analysis model. Traditionally, bot management looked at the end user to determine whether there was a real browser behind the screen. Most bots never fully replicated the Internet browsing capabilities available to human users because it cost too much money. Today, however, we are looking at the behaviors of end users more than their capabilities, which offers more protection against sophisticated bots.”
The Human Interaction Challenge uses visitor behavior analysis to identify normal patterns of usage in web applications and gives clients control over how to manage traffic that deviates from typical behaviors, activities, or frequencies via customizable security postures. Their other addition to the bot mitigation platform, Device Fingerprinting, uses over fifty attributes to generate hashed signatures of virtual and real browsers. ZENEDGE uses these proprietary signatures to detect and mitigate malicious bots in real time.
ZENEDGE’s new platform incorporates supervised machine learning where security experts supervise and analyze outliers from the normal usage patterns and use this analysis to enhance the machine’s capacity for self-improvement. Laurent Gil noted, “The difficulty in bot management today is that we are no longer fighting against human and human-created applications. We are now fighting against machines that are changing all the time, from their IPs to their behaviors on websites. The only way to act as fast as hackers can is to bring in machine learning: to use tools that can adapt in the same ways and become smarter as you use them.”
Over the last six months, ZENEDGE has demonstrated considerable growth, increasing from 200,000 to 800,000 protected websites, which are owned by monthly paid subscribers. To support their customer base, they use a hybrid PoP architecture with bot mitigation infrastructure at all AWS locations and at their own private PoPs. ZENEDGE already has 12 customers utilizing ZENEDGE Bot Manager in their production platforms. Given their wide reach and recent growth, however, they may well see many more soon.