New 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report Reveals Bots Are More Widespread than Expected, and 88% of Companies Find Existing Bot Protection Tools Largely Ineffective

50% of businesses encountered more than 50 bot attacks in the last 12 months, with 25% losing more than $500,000 in revenue in a single attack

BOISE, Idaho--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kount, the leader in fraud prevention and identity trust, today published the 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report, the industry’s first index to reveal the current state of good, questionable and malicious bots, their impact on business and the proliferation of bot protection tools. In working with an independent research firm, Kount surveyed online retail and eCommerce business employees with full-time roles related to fraud prevention, customer experience, payments and management. The findings bring to light new insights into how businesses are using good bots, the breadth of the threat posed by different types of malicious bots and the state of bot mitigation and management.

Research highlights include the following:

• 81% of businesses often or very often deal with issues related to malicious bots.
• More than half of businesses encountered more than 50 bot attacks in the last 12 months.
• 80% say there has been an increase in financial loss within their organization because of more complex and sophisticated bot attacks.
• One in four say a single bot attack has cost them $500,000 or more in the past year, and two in three say a single attack has cost $100,000 or more.

The report finds that evolving bots are becoming increasingly difficult to detect and block, with traditional solutions relying too heavily on blunt force protection, which can then turn away potential customers and revenue. This can include options such as perimeter security, web access firewalls and content delivery networks.

To address critical bot-related issues, Kount is introducing the next-generation bot protection solution, Event-Based Bot Detection, a layered approach to identify and segment bots at key interaction points across the customer journey. Kount’s Event-Based Bot Detection is the first bot detection solution to quickly stop malicious bots, allow good bots, and analyze, classify and adapt policies toward new and questionable bots across the entire customer journey. Kount’s adaptive bot protection combines network, device and behavior signals with billions of identity trust signals from the Identity Trust Global Network.

“The new 2020 Bot Landscape and Impact Report reveals critical gaps in the current state of fraud detection with traditional solutions, as nearly nine in 10 businesses are saying that current options aren’t effective for the increasingly complex and sophisticated attacks of today,” said Gary Sevounts, CMO, Kount. “With digital acceleration at an unprecedented pace, businesses are encountering increasing bot attacks with more consequences, including brand reputation damage. This demonstrates that event-based protection at every step of the customer journey is critical to success.”

To learn more about Kount’s Event-Based Bot Detection, please visit kount.com/bots. Download the full report here.

About Kount

Kount’s Identity Trust Global Network delivers real-time fraud prevention and account protection and enables personalized customer experiences for more than 9,000 leading brands and payment providers. Linked by Kount’s award-winning AI, the Identity Trust Global Network analyzes signals from 32 billion annual interactions to personalize user experiences across the spectrum of trust — from frictionless experiences to blocking fraud. Quick and accurate identity trust decisions deliver safe payment, account creation and login events while reducing digital fraud, chargebacks, false positives and manual reviews. Kount.com