Hacker Bots Fooled by Israeli AI Startup Unbotify

If you’re like us, you tire of automated phishing attacks and an inbox full of bogus friend invites.

Luckily, using an AI to analyze behavioral biometrics, a startup has developed a cybersecurity solution that can tell the difference between humans and would-be bot hackers.

Although cybercriminals go to extreme lengths to make their bots’ activity look it’s been generated by humans, they can’t trick this new Israeli AI-powered security system.

Cybersecurity firms regularly try to up the ante when developing security solutions to stay a step ahead, until hackers and fraudsters catch up (and they always do). And so goes on the endless cyber war.

Unbotify attempts to distance itself from this resource-consuming and unsustainable model. To do so, it’s leveraging behavioral biometrics and AI to keep bots at bay.

Bots are Dominating Web Traffic

If you think that humans are the sole users roaming in the cyberspace, think again! In fact, humans are not even responsible for the majority of web activity.

It turns out the web is dominated by bots, both the good and bad ones. Yes, there are good and bad bots just like the human who created them!

Per Imperva Incapsula’s latest report, more than half of the Web’s traffic in 2016 came from bots. Incapsula randomly selected 100,000 domains and analyzed over 16 billion visits, and found that humans come in second, generating 48.2% of web traffic.

The remaining 51.8% is claimed by bots, with bad and good bots accounting for 28.9% and 22.9% respectively.

This bot heavy web leads to online fraud, security breaches, and inflated Web traffic (and, thus, higher ad prices).

Good bots are those that improve and monitor the use of the web. Google has bots all over the cyberspace, such as crawlers than index your web pages. All other search engines have bots designed to collect and organize data.

Bad bots, on the other hand, are used for scraping data, impersonating identities and spamming. They steal data and content from websites and can infect computers and other devices.

Machine Learning and Behavioral Biometrics to Counter Fraudulent Bots

Unbotify is an Israeli cybersecurity startup that develops solutions to detect bots, using a machine-learning system–counting among its clients large gambling websites and top travel websites in the world.

Unbotify’s SaaS system tracks users to create their behavioral fingerprints that would then be analyzed by a machine-learning system to detect and block bots in real time.

To differentiate between a human or a bot, Unbotify’s system analyzes behavioral biometrics of the website visitor, such as scrolling, mouse movements, how long keys are pressed down and interaction with the device.

Unbotify claims its solution being able to detect the most sophisticated of fraudulent bots.

Last month, Unbotify took the first place at the Cyberstorm competition ceremony, held at Tel Aviv University.