Barracuda deploys machine learning to protect organizations against automated threats

Barracuda announced the introduction of Advanced Bot Protection. Advanced Bot Protection uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help customers defend against the latest automated threats. It is available for both the Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service and Web Application Firewall platforms.

Web applications are the number one attack vector for hacks resulting in breaches, according to the 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, and malicious bots pose a significant threat to application security. Bots have evolved from using simple scripts to using sophisticated tactics such as headless browsers and machine learning to break through traditional application security defenses. Organizations need an application security solution that can keep up with these evolving attacks.

According to Gartner: “Bot mitigation allows organizations to profile traffic to their systems to identify and eventually block access from automated scripts and other types of bots. The main types of bot attacks include distributed denial of service (DDoS), fraudulent purchases, web scraping, and vulnerability scans and exploits. Unsupervised ML can be used to learn the characteristics of typical human-driven traffic, allowing the detection of bots as anomalies. Supervised ML can be used to identify features related to automated behavior.

With Advanced Bot Protection, Barracuda WAF customers have access to functionality that includes:

• Bot spam detection — Reduce referrer spam and block comment spam
• Credential stuffing prevention — Block credential stuffing to stop account takeover attacks
• Request risk scoring — Track incoming requests and use advanced behavioral analytics to detect attackers
• Client finger printing — Track users with better fidelity than IP addresses
• Dedicated bot mitigation UI — New user interface makes it easy to configure bot mitigation features.

“In order to effectively protect their organizations against today’s evolving threats, customers need sophisticated bot mitigation capabilities,” said Tim Jefferson, SVP of Data Protection, Network and Application Security, Barracuda. “Traditional web application firewalls don’t all provide advanced bot protection, and some bot mitigation vendors only offer point solutions that aren’t integrated into WAFs. Advanced Bot Protection is fully integrated into Barracuda’s web application firewalls to provide a complete application security solution that is easy to deploy and manage.”