Bot traffic is on the rise globally, costing businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity. According to Fastly’s 2024 Threat Insights Report bot traffic accounted for more than one third of all web traffic.
Streaming media can be especially vulnerable to bot traffic, particularly during popular live events, where traffic spikes can disguise malicious activity. Data from the same report shows that the Media & Entertainment industry is the second most targeted sector for malicious bot attacks at 21%, trailing only High Tech at 37%.
Here are some common bot attacks in streaming media:
1. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
Bots can be part of botnets used in DDoS attacks to overwhelm streaming servers, causing disruptions, latency, or even outages. This tactic is sometimes used to sabotage competing broadcasts or disrupt popular streams. DDoS attacks can result in loss of advertising revenue, reputation damage, hikes in operational costs with resources being allocated to incident response and system restoration.
Potential impacts of DDoS attacks:
Financial Loss: Outages and slow load times can cost companies millions of dollar. Just ask Apple: their App Store and iTunes outage in 2015 is estimated to have cost around $25 million in lost revenue.
User Abandonment: Even if a site isn't completely down, slowdowns can lead to lost revenue. Research shows that more than half of mobile users exit the site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Reputation Damage: Frequent outages or performance issues can erode trust in your service and make customers turn to your competitors
Increased Operational Costs: Recovering from an attack drives up operational expenses as resources need to be allocated to incident response and system restoration efforts. DDoS attacks can also increase cloud bills for egress costs and other tooling.
2. Account Creation Abuse
Creating fake accounts isn’t inherently malicious, however the scale and speed at which bots can create them can be extremely harmful. Bots can also be used to create fake accounts that coordinate attacks against streamers, flood comment sections with hate speech, or engage in harassment. This organized behavior can cause psychological harm to people and damage your reputation.
Potential impacts of account creation abuse:
Reputation damage: Bots can misrepresent information or spread hate speech that results in damage to your brand and reputation.
Revenue Loss: Bots can lead to inaccurate audience metrics by inflating follower counts, comments, or views. Misleading data can deter advertisers if they notice a pattern of inflated viewer counts compared to actual viewer numbers. In cases where content creators are paid based on views or engagement, bot traffic can result in increased content costs.
Platform downtime: Flooding a comment section or live chat with thousands of messages per second can crash the site and prevent genuine engagement.
3. Account Takeover (ATO)
An account takeover is a form of identity theft that occurs when an unauthorized user gains access to another user’s account. Once logged in, they can change details, make purchases, view private data, and transfer funds without the account owner's knowledge.
Bad actors have different methods to access other users' accounts. One common way to gain access is credential stuffing, where the attacker uses stolen usernames and passwords. Criminals use bots to bulk-test leaked login details on other sites, hoping to find matches and gain unauthorized access.
Potential impacts of Account Takeovers:
Revenue Loss from Subscription Fraud: Attackers can resell stolen account credentials or misuse them to access premium content without paying. This can reduce legitimate subscriptions and directly impact recurring revenue streams.
Brand & User Trust Damage: Users who experience unauthorized access may cancel their subscriptions, leave negative reviews, or switch to competing platforms, leading to long-term brand reputation damage.
Increased Operational Costs: ATO incidents require businesses to allocate resources to customer support for account recovery, fraud investigations, and security improvements. This increases operational expenses.
How to Protect Streaming Sites from Bots
Luckily there are automated tools that can help you mitigate bot attacks with ease. Choosing the right tool depends on what type of attacks you are looking to prevent.
Preventing DDoS Attacks
The most effective DDoS protection tools have massive network capacities to absorb even the largest attacks. As of April 16, 2025 Fastly’s capacity is a staggering 410+ Tbps. Effective DDoS mitigation requires a tool that can adaptively separate sophisticated Layer 7 DDoS attacks from the legitimate traffic they aim to blend with. Fastly DDoS Protection provides automated protection against DDoS attacks by establishing a baseline of a service’s normal traffic patterns and its attributes to quickly detect anomalies and create short-lived rules to mitigate the attack. Importantly, Fastly can mitigate attacks in seconds. This is critical since 50% of DDoS attacks in 2023 lasted just 52 seconds.
Preventing Account Creation Abuse and Account Takeover
Fastly’s Bot Management helps prevent both account creation abuse and account takeovers by detecting and/or flagging suspicious activity through:
Identifying patterns in account signup requests
Detecting anomalous spikes in new account volumes
Flagging login attempts with suspicious characteristics (e.g. compromised credential checking)
Fastly Bot Management uses advanced detection techniques to differentiate between good bots (like Google) and malicious scrapers:
Server-side detection automatically scans request metadata to identify anomalies, highlights verified “good” bots, and detects malicious activity using known bad TLS fingerprints, deceitful user agents, and suspicious headers. Additionally, our CSOC and Security Research team continuously monitors global traffic, identifies repeat offenders across our vast customer base, and flags them for the benefit of all our customers.
Client-side detection: A lightweight JavaScript snippet that integrates easily into any webpage to detect bots using automated browsers (e.g., Selenium, Puppeteer, PhantomJS, Playwright) and helps prevent direct API abuse.
Stopping Malicious Traffic in Real Time
Once malicious activity is identified, you can take action with Fastly’s multi-layered bot mitigation system. With our intuitive rule builder, you can decide when to engage automated traffic through adaptive responses like Dynamic Challenges (something only Fastly and one other vendor can support) or static measures such as interactive and passive challenges, rate limits, or IP blocks.
Dynamic Challenges validates the legitimacy of traffic automatically with Private Access Tokens (PATs) whenever possible and serves interactive or non-interactive challenges to users based on whether the traffic looks suspicious or not. Only suspicious traffic receives interactive challenges avoiding frustrating real users with interactive challenges such as CAPTCHAs. This approach allows streaming platforms to maintain strong security without disrupting genuine viewers.
Other Mitigation Strategies
Individual Passive or Interactive Client Challenges: If you need more control over when and what types of challenges to serve to different traffic sources, you can choose to provide users with either passive challenges that don’t impact user experience but are easier to solve or interactive challenges like CAPTCHAs, which are more disruptive but harder to solve.
IP Blocking allows you to instantly block known malicious traffic based on its IP address.
Rate Limiting lets you control traffic volume to prevent abuse and reduce resource strain.
Want to learn more?
Check out our latest Streaming Media Industry Report for deeper insights into security risks and trends affecting the industry.
