Tag: Access Tier
Welcome back to the Sensor Intelligence Series, our recurring monthly summary of vulnerability intelligence based on distributed passive sensor data. We’ll start off this month’s analysis with a look at some activity from the August dataset, which demonstrates some of the oddities we occasionally see, and then dig into the changes we saw in September…
Read MoreFrom January to April 2023, Healthcare had the highest levels of unwanted Web automation. However, this automation saw a significant decrease in May 2023 before rebounding in June. The Hospitality industry has seen a steady increase in automation starting off as the eighth most targeted industry in January 2023 with 11.7% automation. This peaked in…
Read MoreIn contrast, identity providers in media, retail, and travel tended to see higher overlap, particularly among bot traffic in the travel industry. (High overlaps for aggregators in media and retail are skewed by a comparatively miniscule number of accounts submitted.) The technology industry showed narrow distributions for all three categories, which partly reflects the fact…
Read MoreIntroduction Much of the activity on the internet is automated, and quite a lot of it is specifically due to bots. Bots can be used for many purposes, but in this series of articles we’ll be looking at bots that create and use fake accounts. This first article looks at the motivations behind fake account…
Read MoreOverall Scanning Traffic Changes Lest the downward trend shown in Figure 2 makes it seem like overall scanning traffic may be abating, it’s important to note that the volume of scanning we observed has remained relatively constant, at least over the last three months, increasing by approximately 5.1% from August to September, then falling approximately…
Read MoreIn part two of this multi-part series on fake account creation bots, we look at why automation is used to create fake accounts and how they impact businesses. What is a Fake Account Creation Bot? A fake account creation bot is an automated computer program designed to create large numbers of fake accounts inside online…
Read MoreIn Part One of this series, we introduced fake account creation bots and why people create fake accounts, and in Part Two we covered why automation is used to create fake accounts and how fake accounts negatively impact businesses. In this article, we are going to focus on how to identify fake bot accounts. We…
Read MoreCommon Non-CVE Traffic It may be easy to conclude from the above figures that even though overall traffic has held steady, CVE exploitation attempts, at least for the CVEs and vulnerabilities we track, has decreased. That’s true, but there is a great deal of traffic that our sensor network sees that is not reflected in…
Read MoreIntroduction Black Friday is a popular shopping event throughout the United States of America and around the world. During Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), thousands of companies offer steep product discounts that are not available at any other time, and consumers rush to buy these items while they are available. This…
Read MoreZooming Out to Look at 2023 One of the questions we frequently get asked about this data is about attribution, that is, who is doing the scanning. This is a difficult question, because it is quite well understood that many threat actors take great pains to do at least a bit of obfuscation of their…
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