Announcing Traceable Bot Defense

Today, we are announcing the launch of Traceable Bot Defense - a real-time solution to identify and mitigate bot attacks.

Over the last few months, our team has worked tirelessly to make this a reality. During the journey, we innovated a lot, learned from our mistakes, and built a lot more than we expected going in.

But, before all of this started, we had to answer a key question - why Bot Defense? Although the solution made sense given Traceable’s overall ambition, the bot defense market is already mature with a lot of credible solutions defending against the ever-increasing and ever-sophisticated threat from bot attacks.

The answer was simple: we could do better. We focused on addressing three market shortcomings without making the new solution a zero-sum game:

‍Limitations in behavioral context

Understanding user behavior across an entire platform is crucial for uncovering true intent and effectively distinguishing between legitimate users and malicious actors. While many existing solutions rely on JavaScript-based behavioral telemetry to detect abuse, their deployment is often restricted to a limited set of critical pages due to operational complexities. This fragmented approach leaves significant gaps in visibility, undermining their ability to provide a comprehensive defense against threats.

‍Assisting With Post-Attack Chaos

When bots strike, security teams face two urgent tasks:  

• Victim triage: Identify compromised accounts in real time (e.g., credential-stuffed logins, hijacked payment profiles).
• Impact mapping: Quantify damage across the business — financial losses, reputational risk, operational downtime.  

Most tools excel at blocking attacks but falter at post-breach analysis:  

• Bot mitigation platforms focus on traffic patterns (e.g., blocking headless browsers) but lack user-level context.
• Fraud systems flag suspicious transactions but miss how automated attacks enable downstream fraud (e.g., gift card draining).  

This siloed approach leaves teams scrambling to connect dots between attack vectors and business outcomes—like identifying whether a credential-stuffing attack enabled wire fraud or API abuse.

‍Signal Loss due to fragmented markets

Bot Protection and Fraud Prevention are standalone markets but both target similar malicious activities—account takeovers, credential stuffing, payment fraud through separate lenses: Bot protection prioritizes detecting automation (e.g., headless browsers, CAPTCHA farms) whereas Fraud prevention analyzes intent (e.g., stolen credit cards, synthetic identities).

While their data signals overlap (IP reputation, behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting), siloed solutions create blind spots. This fragmentation forces enterprises to choose between stopping automated attacks or catching fraudulent transactions—a false dichotomy that leaves businesses vulnerable.

Leveraging API Behavior For Better Behavior Telemetry

Fundamentally, APIs are the bearers of the user’s requests and platform’s responses. When a user navigates through the platform, each click results in either a successful or an unsuccessful API call. Hence, identifying the sequence of calls made, understanding the source of such calls, and correlating those with the output gives a near accurate classification of good and bad.

We tested this patented concept on the traffic of our design partners and found it to be relevant for a range of well-known bot attacks as well as human-driven abuse. One of the key ways bots target a website is by first identifying the APIs that provide them the desired output, and then using automation to keep going after those APIs.

Using the detection method, that we call API Sequence and Access Intelligence, we are able to detect them 100% of the time. What’s more - we have built this in a way so that customers can leverage this in real-time to take action on the malicious traffic.

Victim & Impact Identification

Victim identification is a key component to any attack response. Once businesses know that their perimeter has been secured from the attack, they need to fortify the compromised accounts. This could range from asking users to reset their passwords to freezing high value accounts and asking the owner to call and unfreeze.

Because of Traceable’s ability to see the source as well as the destination of the attacks, we can provide a list in near real-time of all the accounts that were affected as well as those that were targeted by the attackers.

The same holds true for the impact to the business because of the attacks. Every attacker, fundamentally, wants to achieve something from the attack. Using a compromised account, they might be looking to quickly liquidate their accounts or place multiple fraudulent orders to a neutral address and then porch-lift once delivered. Traceable’s visibility enables our customers to have a real-time view of such impact as well.

In essence, we have aligned our platform with the business KPIs of our customers.

A Fully Flexible Platform

Every business has their unique logic across workflows that are abused by bots. Often,  businesses don’t want to act on the initial identification of an attack, but want to actively monitor the behavior and actions taken from each account that is deemed compromised. Only after enough evidence do they take action.

This is where a bridge between bot protection and ongoing abuse needs to be built. We have architected a fully flexible platform where businesses can create custom workflows and take action when the risk goes beyond their appetite. The platform allows businesses to monitor actions taken by users or within an account and systematically create alerts or take pre-defined actions at critical junctures such as payments, password reset, payment validation, etc.

Our solution will not only provide our customers with a comprehensive view of the attack, the victims, and the overall impact but also reduce false positives significantly.

Want to find out more? Go to the product page or read the documentation.

This is only the beginning of a long journey and we know we have to continue to build to satisfy the ever-growing needs of our customers. We’re looking forward to maturing the product along with our early adopters.

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