Bot Detection

A bot hits your signup form, creates an account, and immediately scraping your product, all within a few seconds of arriving — and this happens hundreds of times a day from different IPs, different user agents, and different email addresses. You're playing whack-a-mole against an opponent with infinite moles. But nowadays, not all bots are bad!

In fact, you probably want well-behaved bots to spend time on your site, like AI agents and LLM assistants. Traditional bot detection tools are heavy-handed and imprecise, and they're just as likely to block a good bot as a bad one.

Dregs does it differently. By combining advanced bot detection with behavioral analysis, Dregs has what you need to prevent bad and abusive bots while welcoming the well-behaved bots.

The Bot Problem

Bad bots are everywhere. They create fake accounts, scrape your content, test stolen credentials, spam your forms, inflate your metrics, and hammer your APIs. Some are crude scripts that are easy to catch. But the ones that actually cause damage are sophisticated — headless browsers that render JavaScript, rotate IPs, and mimic human behavior just well enough to slip past your defenses.

The bot landscape keeps getting worse, not better. Off-the-shelf headless browser frameworks are free and well-documented. CAPTCHA-solving services cost pennies. Residential proxy networks make IP-based detection nearly useless.

The conventional defenses aren't keeping up.

Each of these defenses catches some bots, some of the time. But a determined bot operator can bypass all of them simultaneously, and the arms race never ends. Besides, even if you somehow identify bots with 100% accuracy, how do you block the bad ones without impeding the good ones?

You need a behavior-driven bot detection approach that looks deeper than surface-level signals.

What Unwanted Bot Traffic Costs Your Business

Bot traffic isn't just a nuisance — it degrades your product, wastes your money, and actively undermines your security posture.

How Dregs Detects Bots

Dregs doesn't rely on any single signal. Its scoring pipeline analyzes every visitor from multiple angles simultaneously — device, behavior, identity, and timing — making it extremely difficult for a bot to pass as human across all dimensions at once.

Humanity Score

The Humanity score is the primary bot detection signal. Dregs analyzes browser fingerprint characteristics that headless browsers struggle to fake: impossible hardware profiles, missing browser APIs, inconsistent rendering behavior, and dozens of other indicators. A real browser on real hardware has a fingerprint that is hard to convincingly replicate in automation.

Behavior Score

Bots behave differently than humans, even when they try not to. The Behavior score catches impossibly fast page navigation, unnaturally uniform timing intervals, sessions that skip straight to high-value targets, and interaction patterns that no human would produce. Even bots with randomized delays still lack the natural variance of real human behavior.

Authenticity Score

When bots create accounts, they generate identity data programmatically. The Authenticity score detects auto-generated names that don't follow natural naming patterns, email addresses that follow predictable formats (sequential numbers, random character strings), and identity data that doesn't add up to a real person. Bots creating accounts at scale inevitably produce patterns.

Device Fingerprinting

Headless browsers leave distinctive device fingerprints, even when they try to impersonate real browsers. Missing plugins, inconsistent screen dimensions, absent GPU rendering capabilities, and other hardware-level signals create a fingerprint that stands out. Dregs recognizes these patterns across sessions, IPs, and user agents, to recognize bot traffic across multiple accounts.

Example: Catching a Credential Stuffing Bot

With Dregs, here's what it might look like when a bot operator runs a credential stuffing campaign against your login page:

The entire detection and response cycle happens in seconds — faster than the bot can finish its first batch of credential tests.

Responding to Bot Traffic

Not all bots deserve the same response. Some you want to block immediately. Others you might want to observe quietly. Dregs gives you the detection signals — you decide how to act on them.

With Dregs webhooks, any of these responses can be fully automated. Your application receives scores, badges, and alerts in real time and acts on them without human intervention — whether it's 2 AM on a Tuesday or the middle of a holiday weekend.