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To get started with Akamai Bot Manager, contact your Akamai account representative. We’ll get you all set up.
Akamai Bot Manager provides developers and admins with a flexible framework to manage interactions with bots. Bot Manager helps you identify all the bots that are accessing your site and categorizes them based on their business role or value. Bot Manager then provides advanced management actions that you can apply to any category of bots to generate the desired interaction.
Akamai Bot Manager gives you unparalleled bot protection via four powerful capabilities:
Bot Manager runs on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, a globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) comprising more than 240,000 servers worldwide. This means that Bot Manager is deployed at the edge, so you’re able to detect and mitigate bot traffic with Akamai edge servers rather than allowing that traffic to hit your origin. As a result, you get faster detection and mitigation capabilities, along with reduced stress on your origin infrastructure. In addition, Akamai edge servers allow for the automatic injection of JavaScript, which means you don’t need to worry about where to inject the JavaScript or making any configuration changes to do so. Finally, simplicity: if you're on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, you can enable Bot Manager in just a few clicks.
Bot Manager enables you to take specific action on different types of bots based on your unique goals and requirements. To deliver this ability, Bot Manager must not only detect and identify different bots by name and type that are interacting with your website but also categorize different bot types in a manner that supports those requirements. Accordingly, Bot Manager provides a variety of methods to detect and identify bots, including known bot signatures, bot reputation, both active and transparent detections methods, and custom signatures. You can then assign the appropriate action to take on different types of bots, either through Akamai- or customer-defined bot categories, or based on the real-time bot detection method.
Below is an overview of five key pillars of Bot Manager’s detection and categorization capabilities (click to jump to any selection):
A. Akamai bot directory
B. Real-time bot detections
C. Web-scraper reputation
D. Machine learning
E. Custom bot signatures
Bot Manager leverages Akamai’s exclusive visibility into global web traffic to maintain a bot directory containing signatures for more than 1,400 bots that commonly interact with Akamai customers. Bot Manager categorizes these bots into 17 predefined categories to help you manage the most commonly seen bots while minimizing any impact on performance. You can easily assign the desired management action on a per-category basis, which provides you with greater flexibility to manage different types of Akamai-defined bots in the most appropriate manner for your goals and requirements.
Akamai-categorized bots provide a foundation for managing a broad spectrum of self-identifying bots employed by known third-party services. However, a variety of other external actors also employ bots for different purposes. Those with malicious intent or employed for less reputable purposes typically do not identify themselves to the website owner and instead attempt to either disguise themselves as human users or spoof other well-known legitimate bots. Bot Manager employs real-time bot detection capabilities to identify these unknown bots as they attempt to access protected websites, including:
Bot Manager helps you automatically identify and manage web-scraping bots based on prior observed behavior against other Akamai customers. Akamai continuously monitors and tracks the behavior of malicious bots as they interact with websites operated by all Akamai customers applying machine learning to its Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) big-data analysis engine. CSI then assigns a dynamic risk score (i.e., the bot’s “reputation”) based on a number of factors:
Based on these dynamic risk scores maintained by Akamai, you can configure Bot Manager to automatically take action on any detected bots with specified reputation parameters. This allows you to simplify management of your bot traffic based on historical web-scraping reputation.
Bot Manager employs a variety of detection techniques—including pre-defined signatures, bot reputation, and real-time detections—to identify bots as they attempt to access protected websites. When Bot Manager identifies a request as generated by a bot, it sends details about that request to the Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) big-data analysis engine. Within CSI, Akamai’s team of threat researchers refine the set of characteristics (features) that are used to identify bots, such as how quickly and for how long a client requests content, how many websites the client interacts with, where the client is coming from, and its responses to fingerprinting and other challenges.
Akamai employs machine learning to continuously analyze these large and dynamic datasets retained within CSI, identify bots interacting with Akamai customers, and detect anomalies in patterns that warrant further investigation. Bot Manager uses the output of this machine learning in several ways:
Most organizations interact with specific, known bots as part of their normal business or IT functions. These can include:
Bot Manager allows you to define custom bot categories in order to assign a desired management action to these bots. Within each category, you can create your own bot signatures based on multiple identifiers, including the IP address or subnet of the bot, AS number, cookie information, or specific information in the request header. Management actions for customer-defined categories override those for Akamai-defined categories, allowing you to provide differential treatment to known bots.
Most traditional bot management solutions only provide the ability to alert on or block suspected bot traffic. Unfortunately, simply blocking all bot traffic impacts beneficial and harmful bots alike. Akamai Bot Manager gives you the flexibility to apply different management actions to different categories of bots in order to achieve superior business and IT outcomes.
There are two main categories of management actions:
A. Advanced actions
B. Conditional actions
Here’s an overview of each:
Bot Manager provides a range of advanced actions to better manage the wide array of different bot types. You can specify the desired action to take for each existing bot category as well as for unknown bots. Bot Manager supports the following advanced management actions (in addition to basic actions that monitor or block traffic from identified bots):
In addition to the advanced actions noted above, you can also conditionally assign multiple actions to a bot category. Conditional actions give you the flexibility to adjust for changing requirements and allow you to introduce an element of unpredictability into the bot response to slow down the rate of bot evolution. Bot Manager supports the following conditional management actions:
In addition to categorizing and taking action on identified bots, Bot Manager gives you real-time visibility into the number and types of bots that are accessing your websites. Bot Manager integrates visualization and reporting of bot traffic into Akamai Security Center within Akamai’s Luna Control Center interface. Security Center displays overall bot traffic statistics along with those of other types of attack traffic, providing a simplified view of your organization’s overall security posture. Bot Manager’s visibility and reporting capabilities are based on five key features (click to jump to any selection):
A. Bot trends report
B. Web security analysis report
C. Bot endpoint protection report
D. Origin signaling
E. Event logging
Here’s an overview of each:
Bot Manager’s bot trends report gives developers and administrators a high-level view into the various characteristics of bot traffic and how those characteristics change over time. The bot trends report gives you visibility into the different types of bots accessing your site. You can easily expand the date range to see long-term trends or drill down into smaller time frames to examine bot patterns around specific events. Statistical information provided by the report includes:
The web security analysis report provides a detailed and granular analysis of your bot traffic. Developers and admins can easily view bot traffic across multiple dimensions over a specified or pre-defined date range, including:
The Web Security Analysis report helps you better understand the behavior of individual bots and botnets, the impact of bot traffic on specific web properties, and the effectiveness of your configured management actions against different categories of bots. In addition, with the Web Security Analysis report you can view sampled logs for filtered or unfiltered bot traffic to further analyze bot traffic at the request level and formulate an appropriate strategy to manage it—such as creating new bot signatures and categories for identified bots.
The bot endpoint protection report (available only in Bot Manager Premier—see Bot Manager Editions section below) helps you focus on the detection and management of bot activity in connection with specific, protected URLs. For the critical parts of your site, you can easily monitor human vs. bot activity and gain insights into the breadth of attacks as well as whether the attacks were alerted or mitigated. Additionally, for any given attack period, you can quickly identify the key attack characteristics. The report also provides key details like origin of the attack (top countries and AS Numbers) and characteristics of the attacker (top IP address, user agents, and botnet IDs). In summary, Akamai built this report to help save you time in understanding what your critical endpoints are experiencing. For further details, see the “Introducing the Bot Endpoint Protection Report” blog post.
Bot Manager can further enhance your reporting capabilities with origin signaling. Origin signaling inserts identifying information into the HTTP header of any detected bot request before forwarding it to the application origin. This can help you in two ways:
Developers can integrate Bot Manager into existing reporting solutions through Akamai’s Log Delivery Service (LDS). LDS provides you with event logs generated from Bot Manager, including events from Akamai edge servers that process bot traffic. LDS delivers log lines on a predetermined schedule—typically within 24 hours. However, due to the globally distributed nature of Akamai’s intelligent edge platform, some log lines may be delayed and be part of a later delivery.
If you require real-time integration of security event data, you can choose Bot Manager’s optional SIEM Integration (see below).
Bot Manager can be extended and customized with these additional options:
Akamai SIEM Integration allows you to integrate Bot Manager into your existing security information and event management (SIEM) infrastructure. This enables you to correlate events from Bot Manager along with those from other security solutions for broader visibility across your entire security infrastructure. You can pull security events data directly from the Akamai platform in real time through an OPEN API. SIEM Integration includes connectors for Splunk, HP ArcSight, and IBM QRadar out of the box; you can also custom-develop connectors for other SIEM solutions.
Akamai Site Shield provides an additional layer of protection that helps to prevent bots from bypassing the cloud-based protections of Bot Manager and directly accessing the application origin. Site Shield gives you a list of IP addresses for Akamai edge servers that are allowed to communicate with the application origin, and through which Akamai will direct all traffic to the protected website or web application. You can then allowlist the Site Shield servers and block all other incoming connections on ports 80 and 443, either at the network firewall or by working with your Internet service provider (ISP). By restricting clients from directly accessing the origin, Site Shield forces bot traffic to go through Bot Manager for optimal bot management.
There are two available editions of Akamai Bot Manager, both based on the same bot management framework but with some important differences:
Bot Manager Premier includes the latest bot detection capabilities suitable for detecting the most sophisticated bots commonly seen committing credential abuse, engaging in web fraud, and other critical use cases. You can also pair Bot Manager Premier with the Bot Manager Premier SDK, which takes the fundamental technology of Bot Manager Premier and applies it to your native mobile apps.
Bot Manager Standard provides bot detection capabilities suitable for addressing a wide range of general use cases, including web scraping, content aggregation, and more.
To get started with Akamai Bot Manager, contact your Akamai account representative. We’ll get you all set up.
Bot Manager Premier SDK for mobile apps