1. Stop Layer 7 DDoS Attacks

During the holiday shopping season, many e-commerce websites face the highest traffic loads all year. Too much traffic drains server resources and can lead to DDoS-like symptoms on your website as human users login in droves—potentially alongside millions of bots. Bot traffic, both good and bad, also increases during the holidays. “Good” bots like search engine crawlers also come out in greater numbers during the busiest shopping days in order to provide the most up-to-date, fresh information on products and services people are searching for.

And alongside all of that real traffic, cybercriminals may be sending swathes of bad bots with the express purpose of overtaxing your resources to take your website offline, impacting your revenue and your customers’ shopping.

Many DDoS attacks take place at OSI layer 7, the application layer—which is where your customers interact with your website or mobile app. Common mitigation methods include web application firewalls (WAFs), manual IP filtering, and ad hoc network analysis, but these fail to stop today’s heavily distributed attacks. The best way to keep your servers from crashing from layer 7 DDoS attacks is to quickly and accurately profile all incoming traffic, distinguishing bots from humans at the first request, all in real time. Suspicious traffic can then be blocked before it interrupts your real users.

All OSI layers should also be protected from DDoS attacks, but the mitigation steps are different for each one.

2. Block Scrapers From the First Request

Scrapers and scalpers are the majority of bots attacking e-commerce sites during the shopping season. Some may be from malicious actors trying to buy up limited items to resell later. Others, however, could be sent by other businesses. Your competitors will likely try to scrape your website to adjust their pricing strategy in near-real time, in the hopes of outbidding you. They would likely use sophisticated bots that heavily distribute their requests across thousands of residential IP addresses in the same countries as your users. Regardless of the tools they’re using to evade detection, your bot management software needs to be able to block scrapers from the first request.

Bot traffic increases server load, and this is even more true when they’re amassed for the holidays. If you don’t stop bot traffic before it reaches your website, you may be faced with increased infrastructure costs, and your site could be slowed down by the heavy traffic load. Performance issues on a website are disruptive to your customers, leading to an overall poor customer experience—which means less profit for your business.

3. Safeguard Your User Experience

Safeguarding your user experience (UX) is key to keeping customers happy—which means ensuring your website and/or mobile app are easy to use, fast, and don’t add unnecessary authentication steps. The key to a good UX is a powerful, flexible bot management software that mitigates bots from the first request. Bots come in droves, and if they’re not handled efficiently, your customers will suffer.

If your website is slow to load, or customers struggle navigating through pages because heavy traffic is causing performance issues, customers will move on to a different website. Additionally, if scalper bots are buying up all of your inventory before a human user even has a chance to, the customer’s frustration will likely impact your reputation.

It may seem easy to just put a CAPTCHA challenge for everyone to solve at checkout to stop basic bots. But today’s bots are sophisticated, particularly around the holidays, and a CAPTCHA challenge will only negatively impact your UX. Traditional CAPTCHAs, like Google’s reCAPTCHA, are not at all optimized for UX, and not great at detecting bots.

The best option for safeguarding your UX is to have bot management software that stops bad bots in real time with accuracy and as few false positives as possible. And if a user must be challenged with a CAPTCHA, ensure it’s as secure and user-friendly as possible.

4. Watch for Bad Bots Hiding in the Crowds

Cybercriminals are more likely to attempt attacks like account takeovers, payment fraud, and gift card fraud when your vigilance is low—such as, for instance, during the holidays when you want users to be able to purchase goods without major hindrances. When your website is dealing with massive amounts of traffic, you may be less likely to inspect every single request in real time. Attackers know this, and they will hold off on their bot attacks until they can blend into the crowds of real shoppers around them.

Without adequate bot protection, bot attacks during the holiday shopping season will ruin the on-call team’s holiday plans. On the other hand, if your protection is ready to quickly and accurately identify sophisticated bots even in huge crowds of traffic, your website will be protected—and the humans in charge of security can enjoy their vacations.

5. Protect on Autopilot, Backed by a 24/7 SOC Team

You don’t want to have to invest too much time and energy into stopping bots when you’re already busy enough with the shopping season. Your bot management software should operate on autopilot, requiring minimal interference from your team. But in the event you need extra help against particularly motivated attackers, does your bot management provider offer a 24/7 SOC team and support?

An effective SOC team involves several threat researchers and data scientists working together to:

• Identify and analyze trends around bot usage.
• Keep an eye on emerging fraud tools offered as a service.
• Infiltrate bot developer communities for insider insights.
• Continually review and improve the ML algorithms used by the detection engine.

DataDome’s SOC team monitors customer traffic, particularly during flash sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to adjust to threats as needed. The team handles everything bot management so you don’t have to: pre-event preparation, responding quickly to ongoing bot threats during the event, fine-tuning protection for your business’ needs, and reviewing the event afterwards to find opportunities for improvement.

Is your bot management tool up to the task?

Unmitigated (or even poorly mitigated) bot traffic causes serious harm to e-commerce businesses year-round, but even more so during the holiday shopping season. Your bot management software should be effective and well-rounded. To make it through the holiday season, ensure your bot management can stop layer 7 DDoS attacks, block bad bots from the first request (no matter how heavy traffic is), safeguard your UX—and it should do this all on autopilot to save your team time and effort.

It’s not too late to properly protect your business from bad bots! DataDome is easy to install, with over 50 integrations available to stop bad bots and online fraud on any infrastructure—big or small. Our powerful machine learning-based engine responds automatically to suspicious requests within 2 milliseconds, keeping your business protected and your website fast. DataDome’s SOC and threat research teams constantly research the newest tools and techniques cybercriminals are using, and update our detection models as needed to stay ahead.

Our BotTester tool can provide insight into the most basic threats your website faces. For more details on the sophisticated threats you’ll find around the holidays, try DataDome for free or schedule a demo ASAP.