Bots will constantly adapt and evolve to stop bot managers blocking them and so it is a moving target. You don’t want to block them altogether, but you do want to slow them down a little to reduce the impact on your infrastructure.Īlthough a bot manager solution is certainly a useful tool, it is unlikely to identify and stop all bots and, in the real-world instance detailed above, by the time it would possibly identify the user as a bot, it may be too late as the damage would already be done.
This is also a useful technique to use for bots that are only harmful because they are too aggressive in their crawling. A better solution is to fool the bot by showing them the wrong content (maybe higher prices – in the case of a bot used to analyze competitor’s prices) or just slow them down. If they know they have been blocked, they can just jump to another IP or try to evolve in order to fool the bot manager. Simply blocking the bot is not always the answer. Tools like this will constantly adapt and learn to keep up with the bots that are always evolving in an attempt to evade detection. Some, such as Akamai’s bot manager solution, can be very sophisticated in the way that they attempt to identify a bot, as well as with the options it will give the retailer in how they deal with the bot. Many organizations, such as CDNs, have been rapidly developing bot management solutions over the last year in response to the increasing problems with bots that retailers are facing. So how do you manage good bots and bad bots? By this point, the damage has already been done and you have tens of thousands of bots simultaneously in your checkout. There is no point in waiting 1 minute to record how many requests a particular IP has made and, if the number is over a certain threshold, you then block them. The record we have seen is 3 million attempts to purchase a single product in a 12 hour period.īecause the requests are all legitimate and the bot is impersonating a real user, it can be hard to block the bots quickly enough before they do the damage without blocking real users. Because the launch time is public and coordinated, the bots all start to attempt to add the product to the basket and go through the checkout at the exact same time, normally many thousands at once.
They are normally distributed across multiple cloud servers with multiple instances of the bot installed on each server. They don’t even need to visit the product display page. In this instance, the bots have been specifically designed for this retailer’s website, and know the exact requests that need to be made to add the product to the basket and go through the checkout. Over the last few years, we have increasingly seen extremely aggressive bots used in the many thousands to attempt to purchase these products to an extent where the performance of the e-commerce platform can be seriously compromised. Most of these products have a coordinated worldwide launch and therefore the exact time of the launch is well known. These products can often fetch 3 times the RRP when sold on eBay, and the retailer will only have a limited supply to sell. We have a client that often sells limited edition products which are very sought after. It’s really as easy as that.Real-world example of a commercial bot causing a lot of issues Once we’ve injected that value then we are all set to complete our signup. const puppeteer = require('puppeteer') const chromeOptions = " ` await page.evaluate(js) For this exercise we’re going to be automating Reddit’s signup page simply because it was the first page I came across that used reCAPTCHA. Make sure everything’s all wired up by taking it for a spin.
You can use a local installation of Chrome if you want it, but that’s up to you.
#Google recaptcha bypass for specific urls install#
You don’t even need to install Chrome if you don’t want it, Puppeteer comes with everything you need including a Chromium install.