Cloudflare launches superior CAPTCHA alternative

Cloudflare has announced the launch into general availability of a next-generation signal and behavioural detection system for bot management, to address the growing threat posed by modern bots.

The solution, Precursor, runs inside web browsers to monitor entire sessions in order to detect bot automation. Unlike traditional CAPTCHAs, which are being increasingly defeated by bots, Precursor analyses ongoing interaction in real time to improve detection precision without interrupting legitimate users.

Precursor has been developed to respond to the surge in automated bot traffic, which has for the first time eclipsed human activity on the internet and now generates roughly 57% of all web requests, Cloudflare said.

The solution continuously collects browser signals to block unwanted traffic, without the need to compromise privacy by recording specific user inputs. It achieves this by monitoring factors such as mouse movement, scrolling rhythm, typing cadence and page visibility duration in the background as users browse the internet.

Precursor can be enabled with a single click without the need for any modifications to underlying code, and uses a real-time analysis engine to validate whether an interaction maps rationally to human behaviour.

Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said modern bots are now smart enough to defeat traditional security checks involving looking at a single moment in time.

“Instead of just checking an ID at the gate, we are looking at behaviour over the entire visit. This makes life seamless for real users, while making it incredibly difficult and expensive for bad actors to fake human behaviour,” he said.

“Cloudflare already protects users billions of times a day at critical moments like login and checkout, but until now, the space between those moments was a black box. With Precursor, we’re now eliminating that blind spot.”

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