Every time there's a Hacker News thread about bots, bot detection, or CAPTCHAs, a familiar complaint shows up: people using VPNs, ad blockers, Firefox forks, or privacy tools get bombarded with CAPTCHAs or blocked entirely. It feels like modern anti-bot systems are punishing users just for trying to protect their| The Castle blog
In every HTTP request, the user agent header acts as a self-declared identity card for the client—typically a browser—sharing information about the software and platform supposedly making the request. It usually includes details like the browser name and version, operating system, and rendering engine. But crucially, this identity| The Castle blog
Bots are often used to conduct attacks at scale. They can be used to automatically test stolen credit cards, steal user accounts (account takeover), and create thousands of fake accounts. Detecting bot activity has traditionally relied on techniques like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), CAPTCHAs, and static fingerprinting. However, with the| The Castle blog
The good old days where bots used PhantomJS and could be detected because they didn’t support basic JavaScript features are over. It’s 2025, and the bots have never been as sophisticated as today. They leverage anti-detect automation frameworks, residential proxies and CAPTCHA farms. Even basic bots that leverage| The Castle blog
In a previous blog post, we talked about canvas fingerprinting, a technique commonly used to detect fraudsters and bots. In this post we'll go deeper on how fraudsters can forge or create fake canvas fingerprints to stay under the radar for typical device fingerprinting techniques. Plus cover some techniques for| The Castle blog
