Cybersecurity firm Barracuda has launched a machine learning powered advanced Bot protection. The company said that advanced Bot protection uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to defend against the latest automated threats. It is available for both the Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service and Web Application Firewall platforms.

The company claimed that web applications are the number one attack vector for hacks resulting in breaches 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 defences. Organizations need an application security solution that can keep up with these evolving attacks.

According to Gartner: “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 behaviour.

“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.”