Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Protecting your application from bot attacks (PRT019)

Summary

• The speaker discussed the challenges of identifying and mitigating bot attacks on customer applications, highlighting the lack of day-night patterns, insensitivity to marketing efforts, and high volume and velocity of traffic as indicators of bot activity.
• F5's client-side signals and algorithms are used to differentiate between human and bot interactions, with examples of how bots behave differently when entering passwords, clicking, and navigating workflows.
• The speaker emphasized the importance of multi-stage defense, including real-time analysis and human-supported AI/ML systems, to identify and mitigate sophisticated bot attacks.
• The talk covered various signals used to detect bots, such as emoji rendering, floating point math discrepancies, and HTTP header analysis.
• The speaker presented before-and-after scenarios showing the effectiveness of F5's mitigation strategies, which significantly reduce bot traffic and improve latency.
• The talk also addressed credential stuffing, synthetic account creation, and unwanted bot traffic in e-commerce scenarios.
• The speaker highlighted the importance of network intelligence and device identifiers in recognizing malicious activity across different applications.
• The session concluded with insights on reducing customer friction through authentication intelligence and session extension, leading to increased conversion rates and revenue.

Insights

• The lack of a day-night pattern in login traffic and insensitivity to marketing efforts can be strong indicators of bot activity, as bots do not exhibit human-like behavior patterns.
• Behavioral biometrics and browser interrogation are critical in distinguishing between human users and bots, which can help in preventing account takeovers and other fraudulent activities.
• Multi-stage defense is essential in bot mitigation, as relying solely on network-layer defenses is insufficient. Real-time client-side signal analysis combined with human oversight and AI/ML systems can significantly enhance security.
• The use of unique signals, such as emoji rendering and floating point math discrepancies, can help in identifying bots that are spoofing user agents or using other deceptive techniques.
• The speaker's mention of the importance of hardening JavaScript and SDKs against reverse engineering by attackers underscores the ongoing arms race between security professionals and malicious actors.
• The session highlighted the broader impact of bot attacks, including skewed company metrics and increased costs associated with content delivery networks (CDNs), fraud tools, and security information and event management (SIEM) systems.
• The success of F5's bot mitigation strategies, as demonstrated by the before-and-after scenarios, shows the potential for significant improvements in application performance and user experience when bot traffic is effectively managed.
• The talk provided actionable insights for AWS customers, including the availability of a new connector that simplifies the integration of F5's bot defense capabilities with AWS services.