This blog post was co-authored by Pons Arun, Director, Product Management.

This multi-national telecommunication and networking company is a leading provider of information and communication technology to service providers and has among the largest share of the mobile network infrastructure market. A company this size is always working on multiple projects with several partners, contractors, and vendors and has to provide these collaborators with access to many applications and websites across the internet.

The Challenges

As with any public-facing content, the customer detected significant amounts of traffic from bots — automated software that attackers often use as a vehicle for malicious activities that can degrade an application’s user experience or even can take the app offline. The customer wanted to block all bot traffic coming to these web apps to prevent malicious automated attacks. Because they wanted to limit traffic to only their partners, it was also key that their content was not scanned or indexed by “good” bots that help to power search engines. So they decided to block all bots.

The Solution

This telecom customer has been a long time Citrix Web App Firewall customer and customer and trusts Citrix to protect their web applications. It was easy for them to turn on signature and IP reputation bot detections methods because those features were included in their Citrix ADC license. There was no new device to install or manage, and the administrators were already familiar with the console.

The customer initially enabled bot management in detection-only mode. This allowed them to see the proportion of traffic from bots and where they originated. After a while, the customer was confident enough to start dropping these spurious clients.

Out of the box, the Citrix bot management solution can detect and block all scanner and crawler bots, including those from search engines. In addition to its detection capabilities, Citrix’s bot management solution can detect sophisticated bot attacks using the artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) engine available through Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service. Learn more about our bot management solution’s ability to detect scanners and scrapers using our AI/ML engine.

It’s Easy with Citrix

The customer was able to leverage their existing Citrix infrastructure and turn on bot detection with a few easy clicks. Citrix bot management was up and running in matter of few minutes, and the customer could immediately view all the bots that were getting detected. Once the customer enforced drop action and started blocking all bots from the application, they could ensure seamless, secure access for their partners.

What’s Next?

The customer plans to use device fingerprinting and the CAPTCHA protection capabilities available through our bot management solution. With device fingerprinting we enhance our bot detection by creating a unique fingerprint based on multiple device properties. CAPTCHA validation offers an additional layer of protection and allows access only to users (humans) who can provide the correct input.

Although the immediate problems are solved, the customer realizes that bots and the ways in which they attack constantly evolve. They plan to enable behavior-based detection capabilities that use artificial intelligence and machine learning models running in Citrix ADM service (learn more here). This will help them stay ahead of the bot army that threatens their partner interactions.

Learn more about Citrix ADC, Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) service, and our bot management capabilities.