Litabi
Today, bots are dominating online traffic. It is estimated that about 52% of the traffic comes from bots. Therefore, there is a need to come up with ways to mitigate these threats. CAPTCHAS is one such solution. They are designed to tell humans and computers apart by presenting a test that a human can quickly solve but is difficult to solve by a computer.
The developments in technology have seen an increase in the intelligence of these bots. They nowadays easily bypass the CAPTCHA solution, rendering them ineffective. In addition, CAPTCHA solutions hurt the browsing experience of a user.
Therefore, it can drive away a user from your site by frustrating the surfing experience. This has the effect of driving away from legitimate traffic. It affects your SEO performance and reduces the margins generated by your website.
Honeypot CAPTCHA
Therefore, CAPTCHA needs an alternative to solve the above issues and prevent the bots from invading your website. A honeypot anti-spam CAPTCHA is such a solution. A honeypot is an invisible field that you add to a form that users cannot see because of the implemented CSS or JavaScript.
Honeypot CAPTCHA And UI/UX
User experience is becoming more and more seamless nowadays, and this includes in the websites. Honeypot CAPTCHA is clever because they do not bother the user. It would be a shame to give a visitor a top-notch welcome only to slam them with an annoying and frustrating CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA on their face.
A UI/UX designer has a vast opportunity to develop eye-catching forms that make people smile and wrap them up with a gorgeous submit button that has an invisible honeypot CAPTCHA.
How Does The Honeypot CAPTCHA Work?
Honeypots are traps, as discussed above. Honeypot CAPTCHA tricks the bot into a trap instead of preventing it from entering the data into the form field. Although the bots are intelligent, they are not real browsers. Therefore, they cannot process external CSS or JavaScript files.
Hence, a honeypot CAPTCHA exploits this weakness to lure the bots by adding a hidden extra field into the form using CSS or JavaScript. When the bots find the form, they go into a frenzy. They fill every part of the form, including the hidden trap field, and the form gets blocked.
Advantages Of A Honeypot CAPTCHA
1. They Do Not Inconvenience A User
They have the advantage in that they do not inconvenience the user like the standard CAPTCHA. This helps stop spambots and other malicious bots. Because spambots fill every form, they fill even the hidden field, and by that, you automatically know you have a bot on your hands. The bot programmers have made them more intelligent since the invention of the honeypot. They come loaded with scripts to detect the honeypots.
2. Captures Only The Malicious Bots
The honeypot CAPTCHA also has an advantage because it captures only the malicious traffic and not all the traffic in its entirety. This is because you can program legitimate bots to understand and bypass your website. Therefore, it means that you have to store fewer data making the analysis faster with faster output.
They also capture details about the type of attack, which analyzes the points that are weak and easy tasks. You can block loopholes, and the bots will not have a way of spamming, scalping, or scraping your site. Thus, the website’s administrator can learn about the emerging types of the attack and design various ways to deal with them.
Challenges Of A Honeypot CAPTCHA
Honeypot CAPTCHA makes it impossible to autofill forms. It makes it a nightmare for people with autofill forms. The autofill fills even the hidden file. The form gets blocked by the honeypot CAPTCHA. However, you can solve it as quickly as preventing the autofill on a webpage.
Drawbacks Of The Honeypot CAPTCHA
Like any other thing, honeypots have several limitations. But unlike other CAPTCHA alternatives, this ranks at the top in service provision.
1. The Bots Can Identify It
With AI and ML, bots have become super intelligent. They can index the honeypot and bypass it whenever they connect to your site. This exacerbates the risk because the honeypot can plan the attack from the honeypot. It may be challenging to detect an attack emanating from the honeypot. So what can you do to stop the bots from bypassing your honeypot CAPTCHA?
Ways To Prevent The Bots From Bypassing The CAPTCHA Honeypot
Are bots becoming intelligent? It’s time to up your game. Below are ways of making sure that the CAPTCHA honeypots are effective at blocking bots and
- To prevent the bot from mastering the position of the honeypot and bypassing it, you can place the CAPTCHA honeypot form in a random location. Ensure that you constantly move it within various valid fields. If the honeypot is in one place, the bot can index and bypass it.
- The second way to deal with it is by renaming the default fields with a random one. Ensuring that you convert the name back to the proper one on the server-side ensures that the two are in synchronization. It makes the honeypots look like valid fields. Therefore, the bots attack them without knowing that it is a honeypot.
- You can also trick the spambots by creating honeypots with the same name as the default one. Adding a label makes it look more legit. You can use CSS and JavaScript to make it invisible. By hiding the honeypot CAPTCHA, you ensure legit users do not fill the form, giving many false positives.
This Method Is Not Distributed
They only collect the traffic from malicious bot actions from a honeypot CAPTCHA computer. Therefore, if the attack is on a different machine, the bots can harm unprecedentedly.
Reporting
Because honeypots are not distributed, they only report the attacks that are directed against them. If various other systems are facing an attack, the honeypot may not have an idea about it.
Conclusion
Because of the effects on a user experience and their low effectiveness, people do not consider CAPTCHA as the first port of call in stopping bots nowadays. You can use various alternatives to deal with this bot menace that has been on the rise. One such choice is utilizing a honeypot CAPTCHA, an effective and invisible solution to the problems caused by CAPTCHA.
Whichever the alternative, no anti-bot or anti-spam measure is foolproof. The bot will always get in. Honeypots turn out to be the optimum choice when you put the user experience in mind.
