Bot Attack

Overview

A Bot Attack is the malicious use of automated software to perform high-volume, repetitive, evasive, or coordinated actions against a website, application, API, account system, or payment workflow. The control exists to reduce the likelihood and impact of compromise by making assets, identities, software, data, exposures, and control responsibilities visible and governable. Automation is not inherently malicious; the attack is defined by unauthorized purpose, abusive behavior, or harmful impact. It should be interpreted alongside Authentication Failures because the concepts can affect the same decision without representing the same control, event, or risk.

The workflow identifies the protected object and owner, evaluates threats and dependencies, applies preventive and detective safeguards, and routes exceptions or failures to accountable teams. Controls should be tested against realistic misuse, version changes, privileged access, third parties, and recovery conditions. In this context, detection should combine rate, sequence, device, network, identity, challenge, and business-outcome signals while avoiding rules that block legitimate customers, accessibility tools, search crawlers, or approved integrations.

It should connect the term to Denial-of-Service Attack (DoS) where that relationship changes access, transaction treatment, investigation, communication, or recovery.

Records should preserve scope, ownership, configuration or policy version, changes, approvals, test results, alerts, exceptions, incidents, remediation, and verification that the risk was reduced. Evidence must be protected from alteration and retained according to legal and operational need.

Useful measures include coverage, control effectiveness, unresolved critical findings, remediation age, unauthorized changes, detection time, incident frequency, repeat weaknesses, exception volume, and recovery performance.

The relationship with API Monitoring should be documented where it affects residual risk or control ownership.