LIMITED SPOTS
All plans are 30% OFF for the first month! with the code WELCOME303
LIMITED SPOTS
All plans are 30% OFF for the first month! with the code WELCOME303
Many businesses do subscribe to bot-blocking services out of advice. They are mostly enticed by assurances that a bot-protection system like hCaptcha will safeguard their site.
Yes, hCaptcha does protect a site from malicious acts like fake sign-ups, unauthorized form entries, and mass login credential attacks. It also stops unwanted traffic from flooding servers. However, there’s a caveat!
If you don’t understand how hCaptcha works, you are more likely to experience some unforeseen consequences. For instance, hCaptcha blocking out legitimate users or blocking in-house website automations.
Here’s what you need to know about hCaptcha to efficiently troubleshoot such consequences and more like, third-party web integrations breaking without clear errors.
hCaptcha is a bot detection system, specifically designed to protect websites from automated bots or scripts while ensuring real users get to access a site smoothly.
The system works by presenting challenges that humans can solve easily but automated scripts cannot. Challenges include image identification, object recognition in multiple images, checkbox verification, or rotating images.
Some hCaptcha challenges are invisible, running in the background to detect and block bots without displaying an obvious challenge.
Despite this extra layer of defense beyond rate limits and firewalls protecting a website, it can introduce more problems.
Say you want to scrape data from your own website or other websites, hCaptcha can stand in the way. That’s why some businesses opt to add a hCaptcha solver in certain sections of their web ecosystem.
True to its name, a hCaptcha solver can navigate the presented challenge and bypass it with little to no human intervention. Nonetheless, to select or build an effective solver, you also need to understand how hCaptcha works.
Let’s now see how bot detection works, with hCaptcha as the main reference point.
Before we proceed, note that there are multiple hCaptcha or bot detection service providers. Each one uses different methods to detect bots.
So, rather than focus on the complexities of what a bot detection setup would look like, we will focus on how information flows and decisions are made at the browser, website server, and hCaptcha level. This way, you can review logs to identify and resolve issues efficiently.
Here’s how bot directions works:
Say you are visiting a protected website. As soon as you send your first request, the bot detection system kicks in. At this point, it just wants to collect information about your request, browser, and device.
The system collects request details like source and routing information, request timing and rate characteristics, HTTP method, header details, and session indicators.
As for browser and device details, it may pick up browser name and features, screen size, time zone, and preferred language. The system may also collect details on how the browser handles sound, scripts, and graphics.
The detection system then combines these details into what’s called a device fingerprint. In this phase, the system focuses on getting these details to facilitate decision making. The website server fulfills requests, you can’t tell whether the detection system is in action, and it does not block your requests.
Besides collecting browser and device information, the bot detection system is also interested in behavioral actions. So, once a page loads and you start interacting with it, the bot detection system is still up.
You click, scroll, move the mouse, touch the screen, or type and the browser listens in and collects this information. It then passes it to the bot detection system in real-time.
The browser also captures subtle details like how long the cursor pauses before a click, typing speed, and mouse movement speed. If you are on a touch device, the browser records finger swipe and tap speed variations.
The bot detection looks at the information coming from the browser as a flow, not as single events.
The website’s server is rarely involved in this phase. Once it fulfils a request and a web page loads successfully, it steps back unless it is required to fulfil dynamic requests within the page. If so, the bot detection system continues collecting more details as requests flow by.
So far, the bot detection system knows your browser, device, and has studied your web interaction activities. It runs a risk assessment and assigns a risk level to your requests
You won’t notice any interruptions in web activities if the detection system deems your requests as safe. The system works in the background, signaling the website server that all is okay.
If the detection system flags your requests as moderately risky, the bot detection system presents a simple challenge or check. Information flows from the detection system to the website server and finally to the browser. And, you see a message and challenge window appear.
Moderate risk category challenges include clicking a box or a one-step objection recognition task.
High risk requests trigger tougher challenges like multi-round challenges, fine-grained visual tasks, harder objection recognition, or sequential reasoning tasks.
Overall, once the detection system presents a challenge, you must first solve it before making further requests. The challenge window sits on top of the page and you can’t just skip it.
As you solve the challenge, the bot detection system keeps collecting more signals.
The system checks whether your browser is running normally. Why? It wants to know whether you are the one solving the challenge or an automated browser or script.
So, it will check clicks, mouse movements, and other signals and compare them to the activities of a normal browser. Other than this, it may send some tasks to the browser to test how it executes them.
For example, it may send the browser a task with expected delay. An automated browser is more likely to run the task faster or without natural pauses, revealing itself.
Besides checking whether your browser is real, the detection system also checks the code of the presented challenge to ensure it has not been altered.
Moreover, it analyses the data collected in phase one and two in a collective manner.
After the bot detection system is done reviewing the full session and analyzing the details at hand, it makes a final judgment. If the challenge’s code has not been tampered with and the solving process went on smoothly, the system creates a secure token.
This token is tied to the current session in which you were solving a challenge, the specific challenge and the moment in time when the system was satisfied that you’ve gone through the challenge and solved it. This locks out any malicious actor who may want to capture the token in transit and modify it.
Besides linking the token to a specific context, the detection system also locks the token and generates a secure key. This way, no one can change it or create a copy.
Inside the token is a small amount of encoded information. This includes the safety level indicating how risky your requests were and when the token was created.
Once the system assigns the token an expiry scope, it sends it over to the browser, which then sends it to the website’s server as part of the normal flow of requests.
Upon receiving the token, the website server sends it back to the bot detection system for verification. This is usually a server to server communication, making it harder for attackers to fake verification.
The bot detection system receives the verification request from the website and proceeds to assess the signature and timestamp of the token. It then returns a response to the website, informing it of the status of the token and its risk score.
After receiving the response, the website reads it and uses the information provided to apply its own security policy. The website may keep granting you full access, limit access to certain features, require extra verification, flag requests for another review, or block your requests completely.
If you’ve integrated a bot detection system, you want to keep a close eye on how your website’s security policies are adjusted based on the details provided by the bot detection system. If you don’t configure decision-making properly, that’s when you start experiencing unexpected issues.
What seems like a security upgrade can sometimes introduce friction or inefficiencies. In the case of hCaptcha, users may complain about repeated challenge triggers or being locked out despite completing the challenges.
Get to understand how information and decision making occurs at the browser, website server, and hCaptcha (bot detection system) level to ease troubleshooting the issues. Remember, assessing your website’s security policies regularly can also help reduce most of the hCaptcha integration issues.
AI tools to find & convert leads. 
Send emails at scale
