How to Fortify Your Bot Attack and Spam Protection for Google Cloud Apps

Beth McElroy

Organizations constantly face threats of fraud and abuse from malicious actors—especially companies relying heavily on digital applications to deliver business-critical functionality. Cybercriminals deploy bad bots and automated attack vectors to carry out sophisticated schemes against unprotected applications and unsuspecting organizations.

Bot-related attacks have become more prevalent and unrelenting—and more dangerous—than ever. One recent expert analysis estimated that 73% of all internet traffic in Q3 of 2023 was comprised of bad bots and related fraud farm traffic.¹

Organized cyberattack syndicates wield a variety of devious methods to extract valuable information, products, and funds, causing service disruptions that frustrate your IT teams and customers. Malicious actors use bots to execute volume-focused automated attacks and advanced techniques to scale their attacks’ destructive and fraudulent reach.

Let’s examine a few common volume-based attack vectors—plus ways F5 and Google Cloud can defend against them.

Comment spam protection

Comment spam, also known as “spomment” (spam + comment), occurs when bad actors flood a blog, forum, video, or other social space with text and links in the hope of diverting web traffic back to their site. The spammed sites could be benign attempts to market and sell a product or service, or they might be links to harmful malware.

Spam comments can significantly disrupt the flow of conversations in your digital community. These invasive bot-driven mentions can discourage people from commenting and participating, potentially decreasing views, engagement, and sales.

An effective first-line defense against “spomments” is to use Google reCAPTCHA to distinguish between human-generated and automated posts to your website.

To further ensure that genuine community members can still participate in your digital space, deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, which engages human domain experts and machine learning to build sustainable bot prediction models that produce a near-zero false-positive rate. Eliminating spam comments protects visitors from harmful sites and helps your company maintain social interactions, knowledge exchanges, and eventual sales.

Combatting spam forms effectively

Attackers also sabotage users by submitting malicious web application forms containing abusive language and redirecting ads and links to phishing websites or sites that attempt to install malware. They automate such spam form submission attacks by releasing legions of bots to spread malware, steal personal information, skew contact lists, bury legitimate submissions, or potentially hijack control of the target web application.

To combat high volumes of spam form submissions, organizations can leverage Google reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from overloading web form pages with faulty and harmful information.

Organizations can further strengthen their protection against bad bots by using Distributed Cloud Bot Defense. F5 safeguards some of the world’s largest banks, retailers, and airlines from malicious bot attacks and pools this knowledge to constantly upgrade the solution’s capabilities to help stop cybercriminals in their tracks.

Parsing fake accounts from the real deal

In another malicious scheme, digital attackers use bots to create fake accounts with stolen or bogus credentials obtained from the dark web to perpetrate fraud against individuals and organizations. Once a fake account is generated and verified, cybercriminals can distribute false information, spread malware, launder money, take advantage of sign-up bonuses, and influence product reviews. When bombarded by volumes of fake accounts, organizations end up at risk of relying on skewed data for operating their business and formulating strategies.

In the case of fake accounts, requiring verification with Google reCAPTCHA is again an excellent defensive tactic to help prevent bots from flooding web applications. You can further augment your digital protection by using Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, which applies artificial intelligence to pinpoint fake account creation tactics and adapt your defenses as attackers retool.

Bot protection with Google Cloud and F5

While these may represent a mere fraction of the fraud that security teams deal with daily, you should still consider reinforcing your Google Cloud applications and APIs with F5 security solutions that defend against high-volume, automated bad-bot attacks. Your customers will show their thanks by coming back.

To learn more, please visit f5.com/gcp.

Source

_{1. Arkose Labs, Breaking (Bad) Bots: Bot Abuse Analysis and Other Fraud Benchmarks, Nov. 2023}

About the Author

Beth McElroy

More blogs by Beth McElroy