Customer Portal Bot Detection

In 26A, B2C Service introduces out-of-the-box bot detection for the Customer Portal (CP) to help administrators detect and block automated bot activity. This enhancement adds an additional layer of protection against common automated traffic patterns that can affect portal availability, performance, and security.

With this update, admins can activate bot detection to help block common bots. Where needed, trusted traffic can be accommodated by maintaining a set of approved user agents and IP addresses that bypass the checks (managed on a need-to-need basis). While this capability provides valuable protection against baseline automated threats, more sophisticated attacks may still require additional security controls.

• Bot Detection: Enables out-of-the-box bot detection to help block common bots (note: some advanced threats may still get through).

Business Value:

• Strengthens Customer Portal security: Helps reduce unwanted crawling and malicious automated traffic.
• Protects CP user experience and operations: Helps preserve CP performance and availability while allowing trusted access when required.

Steps to enable and configure

• Upgrade to 26A.
• Set Configuration Setting (Configuration Verb) CP_BOT_DETECTION_ENABLED (Boolean) to TRUE to enable bot detection.

Tips and considerations

Bot detection is designed to mitigate common/baseline bot activity; consider additional protections if you expect advanced automation or targeted attacks.