The Best Botnet Detection Software

Cybercriminals are coming up with innovative ways to attack devices and networks and steal confidential information. Most times,  this information is sold on the dark web for enormous amounts of money, and buyers use this information to commit identity theft, phishing, mining cryptocurrency, and other malicious actions. In some cases though, cybercriminals can steal the data and ask the organization to pay a ransom to ensure that the data is not sold.

Here is our list of the best botnet detection software:

1. ManageEngine Log360 – EDITOR'S CHOICE Comes with detailed threat analytics and incident response features to detect threats and mitigate them. Access a 30-day free trial.
2. Cloudflare Bot Manager Gathers intelligence from your network and Cloudflare's extensive database to match patterns and identify imminent botnet attacks.
3. Radware Bot Manager Leverages existing bot intelligence and behavioral modeling techniques to protect web applications, mobile apps, and APIs from automated bot attacks.
4. SolarWinds Security Event Manager Monitors your environments continuously for potential attacks and provides real-time situational insights for quick diagnosis and remediation.
5. Imperva Bot Management Uses machine learning models to analyze traffic and pinpoint bot traffic in real-time, across your entire network.
6. Human Bot Defender A behavior-based bot detection and management solution to protect your websites and mobile apps from automated bot attacks.
7. DataDome A flexible bot detection platform that runs anywhere and installs within minutes to provide immediate and comprehensive protection to your networks and devices.

As organizations grow and expand, it has become difficult for cybercriminals to execute attacks with a single device or malware program. This is why they group many computers and use them to carry out attacks. In this article, we'll talk about botnet attacks and how you can prevent them by choosing the best botnet detection software.

What are Botnet Attacks?

Botnet attacks are cyberattacks carried out by a group of computers that are controlled by a single individual or team. These computer groups are called botnets. You can imagine these computers as a group of robots that follow the instructions of the controller. Unfortunately, in this case, the controller provides instructions to harm other computers and networks, and these instructions are carried out by the botnets. Some botnet attacks include spreading malicious software quickly to multiple devices on a network, sending continuous requests to a server to overwhelm it, sending spam emails, and more.

To protect your organization from such attacks, follow cybersecurity best practices like:

• Create difficult passwords and change them often
• Never reuse passwords across websites
• Use top-notch email spam filters
• Keep all software up to date
• Avoid clicking on suspicious links
• Never provide personal information to strangers

Along with the above best practices, use botnet detection software that can protect your network and devices from potential botnet attacks.

What is a Botnet Detection Software?

A botnet detection software continuously scans your devices and networks to look for any unusual activities like a spike in network traffic, similar requests from different computers, and any other sign that could indicate an impending botnet attack.

Additionally, it also checks if any device within your network is part of a botnet. Specifically, it checks if a computer is sending out lots of data without a clear reason, and raises an alarm.  Your security team can accordingly take the necessary actions to disconnect the device or protect your network from a botnet attack.

Now that you know how botnet detection software can protect your organization, let's look at some of the best tools in this space.

The Best Botnet Detection Software

Let's now look into the capabilities of each of these tools to help you decide the best fit for your organization.

1. ManageEngine Log360 – FREE TRIAL

ManageEngine Log360 is a streamlined bot detection and mitigation tool that offers advanced threat analytics to empower you to detect attacks before they impact your organization. It also helps to investigate the cause and mitigate it as soon as possible.

Key Features:

• Preconfigured Attack Rules: Log360 comes with more than 30 preconfigured attack rules that help to identify botnet attacks quickly. It even comes with a custom correlation builder that you can use to create custom rules for detecting attacks. Moreover, its built-in ticketing console generates a ticket automatically when an alert is raised, so you can follow it up to see its progress.
• Real-time Alerts: Log360 offers real-time alerts through emails and SMS to notify your security team of a likely attack. It backs this alert with relevant information about the source of the attack and other pertinent information, so they can take action accordingly. All this information is available in Log360's intuitive dashboard.
• Automated Incident Workflows: With Log360, you can create custom incident workflows that fit in with your organization's existing practices. It comes with an easy drag-and-drop interface to create and modify actions for every corresponding alert. Once you create the workflows, the related events will automatically trigger the response.

Overall, ManageEngine Log360 is a handy botnet detection software that can proactively identify botnet actions and take specific actions based on them.

For ManageEngine Log360, you can request a quote for pricing details. You can also download a 30-day free trial to evaluate the product.

2. Cloudflare Bot Manager

This threat intelligence platform uses behavioral analysis to detect anomalies in your network traffic patterns. It also takes an automated data-driven approach to manage bots and protect your organization from such attacks.

Key Features:

• Wide Range of Detection Techniques: Cloudflare uses a wide range of detection techniques to accurately identify botnet attacks. Along with behavioral analysis, it uses a strategy called fingerprinting, where it collects data from millions of Internet properties to classify bots. At the same time, it doesn't store any user information, eliminating privacy violations. Additionally, it uses machine learning to continuously learn and adapt to the changing threat environment.
• Extensive Attack Detection: Cloudflare goes beyond just DDoS attacks and uses its detection techniques to identify attacks like credential stuffing, content scraping and scams, credit card stuffing, inventory hoarding, and more.  By identifying these attacks early, it saves precious resources for your organization.
• Visibility and Control: With Cloudflare, you get comprehensive insights into your organization's security posture. It analyzes logs and presents insights on customizable dashboards for easy viewing and understanding. At the same time, you have complete control over its configurations.

Cloudflare Bot Manager is an efficient platform for detecting not just botnet attacks, but also many other cyberattacks.

To learn about pricing for Cloudflare Bot Manager, you can request a quote. You can also request a demo to see the product in action.

3. Radware Bot Manager 

Radware Bot Manager is a real-time bot protection tool that continuously scans your web applications, APIs, and mobile apps to proactively identify botnet attacks. It uses a mix of strategies like behavioral modeling, fingerprinting, and collective bot intelligence to identify many cyberattacks, including DDoS, web scraping, and payment fraud.

Key Features:

• Real-time Detection: A highlight of Radware Bot Manager is its ability to identify these attacks before they impact your assets. It compares data flows in applications against a genuine and documented user flow to identify anomalies. Plus, it uses Secure Identity and Google or Apple authentication before accessing the mobile app.
• Extensive Integration: Radware Bot Manager integrates well with existing infrastructure. It uses web server plugins, cloud connectors, JavaScript tags, DNS redirection, virtual appliances, and more to seamlessly work with your existing platforms.
• Reporting and Analytics: The granular data reporting capabilities of Radware Bot Manager make it easy for you to analyze website traffic. It also comes with an intuitive dashboard, using which you can configure custom alerts.

Overall, Radware Bot Manager is a well-developed tool for protecting your web and mobile apps and APIs from botnet attacks.

For Radware Bot Manager pricing, contact the sales team to get a quote.

4. SolarWinds Security Event Manager

SolarWinds Security Event Manage (SEM) is an advanced botnet detection tool that monitors your networks, devices, and the environment for potential attacks. It continuously analyzes relevant parameters to identify any unusual patterns that can signal an attack.

Key Features:

• Blocks Communication Between Botnets and Servers: Typically, bots bypass your organization's firewall, infect your network, and convert your computers also into bots for quicker and wider proliferation. These newly-inducted bots communicate with the controlling server to launch DDoS attacks, mine cryptocurrency, and other activities that can harm your assets. SolarWinds SEM not only quickly identifies the infected computers but also blocks their communication with other devices. This ensures that they cannot spread malware, receive instructions, or do any other activity.
• Helps with Diagnosis and Remediation: SolarWinds SEM gathers logs from your firewalls, intrusion protection and detection systems, servers, endpoints, IAM servers, and other devices. It analyzes them for insights and provides situational and contextual information to your security team. Moreover, it uses community-sourced lists of bad IP addresses to block any request that comes from them.
• Investigation and Compliance: With SEM, you can configure automated responses to security events without custom scripts. All that you have to do is tick certain configuration checkboxes and create custom policies to trigger auto alerts and actions like blocking IPs, shutting down accounts, and more. These configurations and log maintenance can even help troubleshoot real-time events and carry out post-breach investigations. They demonstrate compliance as well.

Overall, SolarWinds SEM offers advanced forensics to help with the detection, investigation, and remediation of botnet attacks.

For SolarWinds SEM, you can request a quote for pricing information. You can also download a fully functional 30-day free trial to explore the product.

5. Imperva Bot Management 

Imperva Bot Management is an advanced platform that protects your websites, mobile applications, and APIs from botnet attacks, without impacting the flow of business-critical traffic. Besides identifying, it also stops bad bot traffic and removes them from your network.

Key Features:

• Extensive Bot Detection: Imperva Bot Management can protect your organization from all kinds of OWASP automated threats by protecting all the potential access points in your network. Such extensive capabilities ensure comprehensive protection along with good returns on your investment.
• Hassle-free Workflows: A highlight of Imperva Bot Management is that it identifies and blocks bad bot traffic without impacting the workflow of your business-critical operations. In particular, it ensures that genuine users who want to use your websites or mobile apps are not impacted by these actions.
• Flexible Deployment: Imperva Bot Management can be deployed on-premises or it can be used as a cloud service, depending on what model best fits your organization. It's also an essential part of Imperva's tech stack, so you can automatically add Bot Management to your existing Imperva services.

In all, Imperva Bot Management is a highly flexible and capable tool that can protect your apps and APIs from most known attacks.

For Imperva Bot Management pricing, contact the sales team for a quote. You can also start a free trial to evaluate how it fits with your organization's infrastructure.

6. Human Bot Defender

Human Bot Defender safeguards your websites, mobile apps, and APIs from automated attacks. It works alongside your security and fraud teams to keep cybercriminals away from your assets and resources and ensure that your websites are used only by human users.

Key Features:

• Analyzes Behaviors: Human Bot Defender works by analyzing the behavior of traffic entering your access points like websites, APIs, and mobile applications. This analysis identifies bad bot behavior and prevents them from accessing your resources.
• Reduces Fraud and Improves Efficiency: With its behavior-based detection workflows, Human Bot Defender reduces the chances of risks and fraud, thereby boosting your brand image and customer loyalty.  It also boosts efficiency as your employees can work on innovative projects that can add to your revenue.
• Provides Insights: Human Bot Defender uses pre-built and customizable dashboards to provide executive-level insights for your organization. More importantly, it integrates with leading analytics platforms to improve the quality of your data and enable you to make informed decisions.

In all, Human Bot Defender is an ally to your security team and enhances their ability to detect and stop attacks.

For Human Bot Defender, you can request a demo and contact the sales team to get a custom quote.

7. DataDome

DataDome is a fraud and bot detection tool that can run anywhere. Its simple code and lightweight SDKs can be easily optimized for your architecture, so you can gain comprehensive protection against potential botnet attacks.

Key Features:

• Real-time Data: Every single traffic that enters your network is analyzed in real time against a host of rules and parameters. Its machine-learning engine can continuously learn from three trillion signals every day to provide comprehensive protection from even the most sophisticated attacks. According to its official website, every request is processed under two milliseconds and with 99.99% accuracy.
• No Impact on Performance: Despite its high processing speeds, there's no impact at all on the performance of your websites or mobile applications, and your end-users will not face any usability issues either. For security teams, it provides real-time information with a low false positive rate, so they can take action right away.
• Extensive Capabilities: DataDome can protect your networks from a wide range of attacks, including account takeover, scraping, denial of service, credential stuffing, DDoS, server overload, vulnerability scanning, fake account creation, and more.

Overall, DataDome is a comprehensive platform that can safeguard your networks from potential botnet attacks.

Thus, these are some popular botnet detection software.

Final Words

To conclude, botnet attacks are catastrophic for organizations and can result in financial and reputation loss. By choosing a comprehensive botnet detection and management server, you can proactively identify botnet attacks and stop them before they create any noticeable impact. Moreover, you can automate responses and remediate them quickly with the insights gained from these tools.

We hope the above tools come in handy to stave away botnet attacks.