Understanding & Mitigating Bot & Automation Attacks with Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Are automated bots and web scraping putting your applications and business data at risk? In this video, we explore how bot attacks—also known as automation attacks—work, how broken anti-automation vulnerabilities are exploited, and how to detect and mitigate these threats effectively. What You’ll Learn in This Video: What are Bot/Automation Attacks? Understand how attackers scale benign actions (like form submissions or asset downloading) to conduct reconnaissance and exploit applications. Broken Anti-Automation Vulnerabilities: Learn about common target areas—such as sign-up pages, feedback forms, search bars, and REST APIs—and how a lack of rate limiting leads to form spamming and data scraping. Attack Simulation: Watch live attack demonstrations against OWASP Juice Shop using Burp Suite (Intruder) and Python with Selenium. Detection & Mitigation with Fastly Next-Gen WAF: Discover how Fastly uses proprietary SmartParse technology to inspect context and executable code, eliminating the need for complex, brittle regex rules. Advanced Bot Management: Explore how to track suspected, bad, and verified bots using JA3 and JA4 fingerprints, allowing you to identify attackers even when they rotate IPs or fake user-agent strings. Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction to Bot & Automation Attacks 1:08 - Broken Anti-Automation & Common Targets 1:50 - Attack Simulation: OWASP Juice Shop (Burp Suite & Selenium) 3:05 - Mitigation Strategy: Fastly Next-Gen WAF & SmartParse Technology 3:42 - Fastly WAF Dashboard: Bot Analytics, JA3/JA4 Signatures, & Filtering 5:25 - Summary & Conclusion If you found this video helpful, please give it a Like, Subscribe to the channel, and drop your questions or thoughts in the comment section below! Talk to an expert about what Fastly can do for your business: https://www.fastly.com/contact-sales