If automated activity is submitting forms or changing records on your website, preserve the evidence, contain the account or technical path involved, and establish what changed before restoring anything. An AI agent is not automatically malicious: it may be authorized, misconfigured, using an exposed credential, or unrelated to the activity. Respond to the verified access path and impact—not just the label “bot.”
What to do first
- Preserve evidence. Note the time range, affected records, request and application logs, account or integration identity, and recent configuration changes. Keep protected copies so the evidence is not overwritten, altered, or deleted during response. Useful records include user activity, administrator actions, network traffic, application logins, and system events.
- Contain the access path. Restrict or disable the implicated account, API key, integration, agent, or endpoint as appropriate, while retaining enough access to investigate. If a credential may be exposed, revoke it and issue a replacement with only the permissions required. Avoid making a broad block before identifying what it would disrupt.
- Scope the changes. Search for related activity by the same identity, key, IP address, session, or time window. Check forms, records, permissions, and downstream actions. An authorization flaw can enable unauthorized reads as well as writes, creations, and deletions, so check both confidentiality and data integrity.
- Recover from trusted records. Compare affected data with audit history or a known-good backup. Preserve the evidence first, then restore only the records that need recovery; a blanket rollback can erase legitimate changes made in the same period.
- Escalate and monitor. Notify the site’s security or operations owner and follow the organization’s incident-response and notification procedures. Record what you disabled, changed, or restored, then watch for recurrence.
NIST’s current incident-response publication is SP 800-61 Rev. 3, published in April 2025; it supersedes Rev. 2.
Work out whether the automation was authorized
Do not assume that an AI agent caused an unexpected request just because its activity looks automated. Establish the identity and route used: an authenticated integration, API key, user session, direct form endpoint, or other source. Compare the activity with the site’s intended automation policy and account permissions.
- Authorized agent, unexpected behavior: pause or narrow its permissions, inspect its configuration and recent instructions, and determine whether it exceeded the intended scope.
- Possibly exposed credential: revoke the credential, check where it was used, and review the permissions it granted. Replace it only after assigning the minimum necessary scope.
- Unrecognized or unauthenticated traffic: investigate the endpoint, request pattern, and related records. A browser-side challenge may not protect an endpoint receiving direct requests.
- Legitimate automation: preserve access where possible through an explicit, narrowly scoped policy. Search crawlers, monitoring agents, and accessibility tools can be legitimate; blocking every automated actor can break useful services.
Prevent repeat form submissions and unwanted changes
Validate form protections on the server
A visible widget or client-side check is not a security boundary: a script can send a direct POST request to the endpoint. Validate anti-bot tokens on the server before processing a submission, and reject missing or invalid results. Cloudflare’s form-protection guidance, updated August 25, 2026, says server-side validation is required. Endpoint rate limits provide an additional layer, not a substitute for token verification.
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Set rate limits for the endpoint and its normal use
Measure ordinary traffic before setting thresholds, then tune limits and responses for the particular endpoint. Where supported, consider limits tied to identity or session as well as IP address. IP-only rules may miss activity distributed across many addresses and can affect people sharing a network.
Use risk scores as signals, not verdicts
Google reCAPTCHA v3 returns an interaction score from 0.0 to 1.0: its documentation describes 1.0 as very likely a good interaction and 0.0 as very likely a bot. The score is site- and action-specific, not a universal allow-or-block threshold. Verify the response on the backend and check that its action name matches the action expected by your application. Tokens expire after two minutes.
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Match friction and authorization to the impact
For low-impact actions, a validated token or rate limit may be sufficient. For account-setting changes, publishing, transfers, or sensitive-record edits, enforce authorization checks and consider reauthentication, step-up verification, or human review proportionate to the consequences. A risk score can help select a response, but should not replace permission checks.
Make bot policies deliberate and observable
Allow or block specific automated actors only when there is a clear policy and a way to verify identity where possible. OWASP’s anti-automation guidance says the aim is not to block all bots, but to raise the cost of abusive automation while keeping legitimate users and bots unaffected. Log whether requests were allowed, challenged, rate-limited, or blocked, along with relevant signals; protect those logs and avoid collecting unnecessary sensitive data.
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Choosing a control for the problem
| Control | Useful when | Trade-off or check |
|---|---|---|
| Server-side token verification | A form needs a low-friction check against automated submissions. | Verify every token on the server and reject invalid or missing results; client-side checks alone can be bypassed. |
| Rate limiting | An endpoint receives excessive repeated requests. | Tune to normal traffic. IP-only limits can miss distributed requests or affect shared networks. |
| Risk scoring | Different actions warrant different levels of friction. | Observe and tune by action; a score is a signal, not a universal threshold. |
| Challenge or step-up check | A higher-risk action needs stronger verification. | Account for accessibility and user friction; avoid challenging every action by default. |
| Allowlisting or blocking | The site has a clear policy for a specific automated actor. | Keep rules narrow so legitimate search, monitoring, and accessibility activity is not unintentionally blocked. |
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