Don’t Let the Bots Win: Taming Web Traffic Without Hurting Real Users
With automated traffic now surpassing human users and with "bad bots" making up 37% of web traffic, the modern web is increasingly hostile. Traditional security measures like robots.txt are routinely ignored, leaving modern applications highly vulnerable to non-organic traffic surges. This results in outages, increased infrastructure spend, skewed metrics, and decreased confidence from advertising networks. Attendees will learn how to counter this threat by deploying a Web Application Firewall (WAF), while navigating its trade offs such as elevated page load times and false positives that can mistakenly block human users, search engine crawlers, or third-party ad integrations. The session presents a rollout playbook, based on a real world case study from a global media company: a phased, risk-managed approach to introducing WAF safely and reducing bot traffic without disrupting legitimate users or business-critical integrations. This session is aimed at engineers and anyone responsible for the performance, security, or business metrics of a high-traffic website.
Eve Brennan
Eve is a Cloud Engineer IV at a global media company. Her experience spans cloud infrastructure, software engineering, and site reliability engineering. Beyond her core work, Eve organises DevOps Belfast, a meetup group dedicated to fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration between the people building, deploying, and operating modern software. Eve is also a curator for the BelTech conference and an AWS Community Builder.