Latest Fastly Bot Management update reduces CAPTCHA reliance, enhances bot detection, and highlights compromised credentials

GUEST RESEARCH:  Barracuda threat researchers have found that bad bots are evolving to become more advanced and human-like in their behavior in order to boost the chances of success in account takeover and other automated attacks. In a new report on bot activity over the last 12 months, the researchers also noted an emerging category of AI bots, which could be considered as “grey bots,” is blurring the boundary of legitimate activity.

COMPANY NEWS:  The introduction of publicly available Generative AI tools at the end of 2022 launched us into one of the biggest technological revolutions in human history.

GUEST RESEARCH: Once used primarily by search engines, bots now have a variety of uses — both good and bad. The good bots are primarily search engine crawlers and other similar bots used for aggregating or monitoring content. These bots obey the website owner’s rules as specified in the robots.txt file, publish methods of validating them as who they say they are, and work in a way to avoid overwhelming the websites and applications they visit.

GUEST OPINION: It's May 2020 and a large electronic goods retailer realises its bot problem is going from bad to worse.

Google has killed the CAPTCHA by recapturing the simplicity of asking you to tick a check box, but if Google’s API isn’t sure, a reCAPTCHA arises from the dead to mess with your eyes and head in its quest to prove you’re not a robot, spammer or other automated online abuser.

Telstra may have killed the CAPTCHA thanks to an ACCAN initiative pointing out the squiggly letters and numbers are discriminatory against the disabled, but a new Australian start-up aims to kill them by making them fun - and picture based.

Two Brisbane-based QUT game developers have announced angel funding for their product FunCaptcha, which helps prevent spam and improve the security of thousands of websites.

Telstra has announced a new portal to help the disabled choose equipment, has stopped using CAPTCHA, and is captioning some BigPond content.

Australian consumer and disability organisations have begun a campaign to reduce the use of CAPTCHA, the annoying visual tests used by websites to prove users are human.

MessageLabs Intelligence has observed the amount of spam sent out from webmail accounts is changing.

If you want to keep the spambots out of Gmail then you might want to try a bit of upside down thinking.