Data privacy and security regulations, including the GDPR and CCPA, require your organization to make any data that you collect on your customers available to them. However, bot attacks can compromise both data privacy and accessibility, which can lead to compliance violations and other ill effects.
To keep the bots from taking you down, use rate limiting and other security tools. While they may not block every bot, they can keep your systems up and running while limiting the bot attacks and preventing infiltration.
Security Impacts of Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is the restriction of requests from a single source. Its goal is to ensure that legitimate users are able to access and interact with a website, API, or application by preventing resources from becoming overwhelmed. When a user makes too many requests or begins hogging bandwidth, rate limiting reduces its responses. It may also slow responses.
Rate limiting protects against several types of attacks, including:
- Credential stuffing. These attacks can be used for account takeover. If an attacker has a list of credentials (which could be pulled from a compromised database elsewhere or purchased on the dark web), they can execute a credential stuffing attack. Trying to log in to a user’s account with the usernames and password combinations until one works is often effective with enough time and attempts.
- Brute force. Although technically a brute force attack is a type of credential stuffing, there is a critical difference. Attackers who use brute force attacks do so because they don’t have a list of credentials to try, so they’re likely using bots to guess and enter credentials. If your passwords are neither complex nor unique, a brute force attack has higher odds of success.
- DDoS. A DDoS attack blocks legitimate users from accessing your application or website by overwhelming the system with requests. While rate limiting has a less decisive impact because DDoS attacks typically come from a variety of sources, it can still limit the degree to which traffic overwhelms system resources.
- Inventory denial. For websites that update inventory, typically a more sophisticated retail site, this attack can create artificial scarcity. The attack begins transactions without finishing them, removing the item from inventory without completing payment. This is frustrating for both the retailer and the other customers. Rate limiting prevents a single user from starting large numbers of transactions.
- Data scraping. Vulnerability exploitation has gotten easier for attackers as many companies have included open source code into their applications and APIs. While this is convenient, it means attackers can search the public code for vulnerabilities before they ever attack you, which gives them an advantage. Once an attacker has found a weakness, that weakness can be exploited to access your application and pull confidential or sensitive data out.
Because it limits the number or frequency of requests from a single source, rate limiting mitigates attempted exploitation of vulnerabilities through floods of requests. While rate limiting is not enough to protect your applications and network on its own, it can be an important tool for security and compliance.
Rate Limiting and Compliance
Bot-driven attacks are a menace to both your security and your compliance. Data privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA have made regulations pertaining to data storage, handling, and transmission more stringent, which makes blocking account takeover attacks and other bot-driven threats imperative.
Additionally, these regulations require companies to make consumers’ data accessible to them, so downtime caused by bots may also violate your local regulations. To ensure that you’re keeping customer (and your own) data safe and available, implement bot protection solutions that include rate limiting. Alone, rate limiting won’t keep all of the bots away from your applications, but it can reduce the impact of bots and protect your environment from infiltration and inaccessibility.
For example, if there are repeated requests made using a login form from a single IP address, rate limiting will block continued requests, which will stop a credential stuffing or brute force attack. By preventing unauthorized access, your organization protects consumer data from exploitation, illegal sale, or unwanted deletion. It also keeps your application available for consumer access.
Given the reputational damage and steep fines that your organization will gain through security incidents and noncompliance, it’s in your best interest to lock down consumer data as much as possible. Rate limiting tools are sometimes susceptible to false positives, requiring legitimate users to slow down their activities. However, compared to their accounts and credentials being compromised, this is a minor inconvenience.
Protecting Applications and Ensuring Compliance
To ensure that you are protecting your applications, implement a full roster of security tools. Rate limiting algorithms are important for mitigating bot attacks, but additional tools are necessary for maximum security and compliance.
A comprehensive bot protection solution should include several tools:
- A web application firewall detects unusual activity and blocks it before it reaches your application. This reduces the number of bots that your rate limiting algorithm must enforce.
- Web application and API protection solutions include WAF functionality but also protect your APIs from illegitimate traffic.
- RASP. Rather than blocking bots from outside of an application, RASP tools monitor application activity and block improper executions. So, if a bot slips past the WAF, RASP catches it by monitoring application behavior.
- DDoS protection. Another external line of defense, DDoS protection uses rate limiting and other tactics to block or absorb bot traffic. Some solutions are able to expand available bandwidth or server space to handle the traffic influx while keeping resources available for legitimate traffic.
Rate limiting and other privacy-enhancing features are essential for keeping data secure and available. The GDPR and CCPA both require that consumers have unfettered access to their own information, so organizations must ensure that bot traffic does not prevent that access.
There’s no shortage of malicious bots floating around. Protecting your applications, APIs, and network from them is essential for business continuity and avoiding compliance violations, both of which you need for retaining your customers. With the right tools, including rate limiting, you can keep the bots at bay.
With over a decade in the tech field, Bogdan blends technical expertise with insights on business innovation in technology.
A regular contributor to TMS Outsource's blog, where you'll find sharp analyses on software development, tech business strategies, and global tech dynamics.
- How to Use Git: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners - March 21, 2025
- What Is Git Bash? A Beginner’s Guide to Using It - March 20, 2025
- Can You Find Out How Big Your Digital Footprint is? - March 20, 2025
