This article originally appeared in the September 2021 issue of Security Business magazine. When sharing, don’t forget to mention Security Business magazine on LinkedIn and @SecBusinessMag on Twitter.
Last month, I opened our annual State of the Industry survey, and as I had done in the past, I posted the link and the opportunity to be randomly selected for a gift card reward to our social media pages.
That led to this email one day later, sent to all of my supervisors, company executives and marketing folks: I posted the annual State of the Industry survey on the Security Business Linkedin page yesterday. This is the only promotion we have done outside of a full-page house ad in the August issue. We already have 88 responses in a matter of 16 hours.
I was, in a word, overjoyed. Our industry has really (and finally) embraced our research project, I thought to myself as I typed that email. An hour later, I opened the survey report again. This time, there were nearly 200 responses…and overjoyed quickly turned into dread. I started to look at the survey responses, and it was red flag after red flag:
- Just about every single response came from a gmail account;
- Many responses came in between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. on the East Coast;
- Most responses took 3 minutes or less to complete;
- None of the names even remotely matched the gmail address; and
- Company names were either gigantic (like ExxonMobil), absurd (like Beautiful Security Garden), or completely irrelevant (like Liberty Wealth Planner).
By this point of my analysis, we were getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 spam responses every 10 minutes – all in an effort to game the system for a few $50 gift cards. Total responses numbered in the hundreds, and if we didn’t notice, our annual survey would have been ruined by literally thousands of bogus replies. Talk about the power of social media!
Turns out, of course, that I was experiencing a form of a cybersecurity breach – the dreaded bot attack.
Bot protection software vendor DataDome defines bot traffic as “internet traffic coming from automated software that is designed to perform repetitive, mostly simple tasks. These bots, the automated software, can perform these tasks around the clock, and often much quicker than any human ever could.”
To try and stem the tide, we added a “disqualifier question” to the survey, so when the bot answered wrong, they were booted. We got hundreds of “disqualified” responses, but just as many bots managed to choose the correct answer and continue.
I was distraught. The person who handles our research surveys was now inundated with the simple task of deleting bad survey responses – which was like the old cartoon where someone plugs the water leak in the dam and another stream happens a foot away. I felt terrible…why was this happening?
I talked to many colleagues, trying to find a solution. As I chatted with our website editor, Joel Griffin, and explained everything that was happening, he nailed the issue right away: “You need to trash that social media post about the gift cards…that’s your only hope,” he said.
He was right. I took down the social post promising the giveaway and the bot traffic slowed and eventually dried up completely.
So, what’s the takeaway of this harrowing tale? “Even when bot attacks are unsuccessful in executing their malicious objectives, they can still strain your web servers and hurt your website’s performance, in some cases to the point of making the website unavailable for human visitors,” DataDome explains. “Effective management of bot traffic is therefore very important for any business with an online presence – but this is not an easy task.”
As I write this, I am about to repost the survey on social media with no mention of a gift card. Wish me luck. Oh and by the way, it would be super great if you could take a few minutes to fill out our State of the Industry survey (the link is www.research.net/r/7D9ZKZ3) …let’s just keep the reward part a secret between us humans.
Paul Rothman is Editor-in-Chief of Security Business magazine. Email him your comments and questions at [email protected]. Access the current issue, full archives and apply for a free subscription at www.securitybusinessmag.com.
