GigaOM Radar Edge Platform Leader & Outperformer 2024 | 
Automated bot attacks have grown in both scale and sophistication. While some bots serve legitimate purposes—such as search engine crawlers—many are created with malicious intent, such as scraping valuable business data or exhausting inventory by exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications.
As cybercriminals increasingly employ cache-busting techniques and complex behavioral patterns, businesses require a more nuanced, dynamic approach to bot management—one that blends signature detection, AI, and real-time threat intelligence. Edgio’s Premier Bot Manager was built from the ground up to leverage this multi-pronged approach, offering comprehensive and scalable protection against malicious bots while maintaining optimal application performance.
Let’s get into a few of the major features available today in Premier Bot Manager.
Customer-Dedicated AI Models
Advanced bots often mimic human behavior, making traditional detection techniques less effective. AI’s ability to learn from specific traffic patterns – differentiated at the customer level – allows for more accurate identification of bots trying to disguise themselves. With dedicated AI pipelines adapting to unique traffic patterns of our customers, Premier Bot Manager delivers enhanced protection against persistent bots.
Enhanced Known Bot Classification
Not all bots are bad. Search engines, marketing crawlers, and AI-driven platforms help improve SEO, brand visibility, and customer engagement. Blocking all bots from any company could hinder business objectives, so granular control allows businesses to permit beneficial bots while blocking malicious ones.
Premier Bot Manager includes granular bot classifications, constantly updated by Edgio’s data science and threat research teams. Benign bots are not simply identified by their operator or organization but are categorized by use case, including social media/messaging, search engine/SEO, monitoring, and more. This provides customers with greater visibility into bot activity and equips security teams with actionable insights for specific types of bots, both good and bad.
Edgio’s data science and threat research teams constantly expand bot classification to give greater visibility and control over bots.
JA4+ Detection
Advanced bots can spoof IP addresses and user agents, making them hard to detect. Premier Bot Manager incorporates the latest JA4+ Transport Layer Security (TLS) fingerprinting to detect threat actors across multiple layers of security. JA4+ fingerprinting is a significant advancement in network security because it provides a comprehensive suite of modular fingerprints for multiple protocols, including TLS and HTTP. This multi-protocol approach enhances the accuracy and resilience of identifying and tracking network connections.
Build custom bot rules to track or mitigate bots with the latest JA4+ fingerprints or several other characteristics.
Bot Score Threat Intelligence
Bot attacks and other undesirable bot behavior vary in severity- bots are not created equal. A bot performing a DDoS attack poses an immediate threat, while a scraper might be more of a long-term nuisance. With bot score threat intelligence, bot rules can be tailored based on threat scores to ensure mitigation actions are aligned with the risk appetite of the business. Providing additional classification (e.g. credential stuffing, scraping, etc.) and context for bots with a maliciousness score enables better decision making and more effective mitigation.
Seamless Integration for a Holistic Defense
Premier Bot Manager is seamlessly integrated into Edgio’s Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform, working alongside Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS, API, and client-side protections. This holistic approach ensures that enterprises can defend their web properties comprehensively, while deployment at Edgio’s low-latency edge ensures that mitigation measures are enforced in real-time, closest to where attacks originate for better performance and security.
View of Edgio’s Security Applications Manager, and intuitive interface that now includes Premier Bot Manager, part of Edgio’s multi-layer Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solution.
Looking Ahead: The Future of Bot Defense
As bot attacks continue to evolve, organizations need cutting-edge tools to stay ahead of these threats. Premier Bot Manager offers just that—advanced detection and AI-driven intelligence designed to identify, classify, and mitigate bot activity across a wide array of use cases. With tailored AI models, granular bot categorization, and the latest JA4+ detection techniques, Edgio’s Premier Bot Manager ensures that businesses remain secure in the face of increasingly sophisticated bot attacks.
At a time when the average cost of a data breach can exceed $4 million*, investing in robust bot management solutions like Edgio’s Premier Bot Manager is not just smart—it’s essential for long-term business resilience.
*IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report
