Accurate and Effective Bot Management – Without CAPTCHA

It’s Time to End Unnecessary, Poor User Experiences

Does the user experience have to suffer to achieve effective bot management? The answer to this important question is a resounding “no”. Security teams rightfully want to ensure that users are properly authenticated before being authorized to access, enter, or edit sensitive information. Malicious bots must be kept at bay, detecting their presence and blocking them. By the same token, business unit leaders, e-commerce chiefs, and UX personnel want the user to have a great experience, with minimal waiting or frustrating hoops to jump through before they are able to use an application.

What is CAPTCHA?

Unfortunately, security and usability have often historically been employed at the expense of one another. A prime example of this trade-off is the use of legacy visual CAPTCHA systems — those familiar image or text challenges designed to verify that a real person, not a bot, is interacting with an application. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and while the intent is to block automated threats, the result is often a frustrating experience for legitimate users.

CAPTCHAs Introduce User Friction and Accessibility Issues

The visual CAPTCHA systems most of us are familiar with require an application user to view a picture divided into pieces and identify all of a requested element before proceeding. For example, a picture of a city street is shown and the user is asked to successfully pick all of the pieces that contain a motorcycle before being allowed to proceed. It’s a silly pain for the user, and if they mess up they get to do it again. Or, a picture of a jumbled, stylized word is shown and the user must type in the word. Is that a ‘Z’, a ‘z’, or a ‘2’?

CAPTCHAs Are Ineffective for Modern Bot Attacks

Not only is this an exercise in frustration for the user, but it’s no longer effective. There are now commercial services that the bad guys can use to automatically solve these common CAPTCHAs. And, AI has quickly gotten to the point where it can handle more complex images. A few years ago, Forbes reported that between 8 and 29 percent of users fail to solve these challenges, and user impatience for such nonsense has only increased. Further, the article quoted a study showing a 3.2% negative impact to sales.

CAPTCHAs Are Obsolete for Modern App Experiences

It should also be noted that CAPTCHAs cannot protect APIs and AI agents as there is no way to integrate JavaScript into them. Modern architectures are built on APIs, which are fast becoming one of the top targets for attackers, so any purported bot solution that cannot protect APIs is not an acceptable “solution.” AI agents are essentially two-sided APIs, so they cannot be protected by CAPTCHAs either.

Sadly, many organizations still use traditional CAPTCHA systems that frustrate users. Delivering a great user experience that separates your application from others is a real competitive advantage, so choose your bot management system wisely. The time for traditional visual CAPTCHA systems has passed, and luckily there’s a more modern take on this problem, and it’s more effective to boot.

A Novel Approach to Bot Detection and Protection

Cequence has taken a different approach to identifying and preventing malicious bots. Rather than looking at user signals such as solved CAPTCHAs, mouse movements, or other client telemetry, Cequence employs unique fingerprinting technology that leverages behavioral intent across web, mobile, and API traffic. Our behavioral fingerprinting analyzes bots through four key pillars: infrastructure (source of traffic), tools (such as bot platform), credentials (such as usage of stolen credentials), and behavior. The fingerprinting technology also enables Cequence to identify API business logic abuse and differentiate it from regular API use, for example.

Cequence’s behavioral fingerprinting is made possible through our network-based approach. Instead of client-side app modifications, we inspect application and API traffic while it traverses the network, examining the content to detect malicious intent such as attempts to exfiltrate data from the application or carry out business logic abuse on a targeted application. Machine learning is employed to accurately distinguish human from “synthetic” traffic as well as to detect both legitimate bots (such as web crawlers) and malicious bots.

The Benefits of a Network-based Approach to Bot Management

Our network approach has several tangible benefits over legacy approaches that require applications to be modified in order to detect bots:

• No JavaScript, SDK, or other application modification required, resulting in up to 90% faster application onboarding times – protection in hours rather than weeks.
• Coverage for web applications, mobile apps, and APIs.
• Unified, consistent protection across all applications and APIs, regardless of type (e.g., login, payment, etc.)
• Unlike CAPTCHAs that create conversion barriers, network-based detection operates continuously in the background, stopping sophisticated attacks without penalizing legitimate customers.
• Effectiveness is maintained as attackers can’t reverse engineer the protection like they can with JavaScript and other client protections.
• Advanced machine learning algorithms continuously adapt to emerging bot behaviors, creating a more sustainable security approach than static CAPTCHA implementations.

What About Bot Defense?

Once malicious bots have been detected, of course you want to enforce mitigation actions. Cequence offers a variety of native mitigation options including blocking, logging, rate limiting, header injection, and deception. The solution can even automatically create mitigation policies based on bot activity that can either be applied autonomously or after human review.

Summary

It’s time to move on from CAPTCHAs and other irritating, ineffective bot deterrents that require app modifications. The network-based approach is clearly superior, offering much improved time to value and more comprehensive coverage. Cequence can be deployed without first removing an existing CAPTCHA solution – simply route some traffic through Cequence and see the results. If you’re interested in giving it a try, contact us for a personalized demo or a rapid trial.