Bot Management.

Bot management is the practice of detecting automated traffic and distinguishing good bots from malicious ones, then allowing, challenging, or blocking each accordingly. It belongs to the Network Security category of cybersecurity.

Bot management is the practice of detecting automated traffic and distinguishing good bots from malicious ones, then allowing, challenging, or blocking each accordingly.

Bot management goes beyond simple CAPTCHA and IP blocklists. Vendors like Akamai, Cloudflare, DataDome, HUMAN, and Imperva fingerprint clients via TLS, HTTP/2 ordering, browser execution, behavioral biometrics, and ML scoring to assign a likelihood that a request is human, a benign bot (search engine, monitoring), or a malicious bot (scraper, scalper, credential stuffer). Policies then allow, challenge with JS or CAPTCHA, throttle, serve deceptive content, or block. Bot management complements WAF and rate limiting and is essential against carding, inventory hoarding, account takeover, and content theft. Modern attackers use residential proxies and headless browsers, so detection must be continually retuned.

Defences for Bot Management typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

Common alternative names include: Anti-bot, Bot mitigation.