Tag: Fraud
Even Strong Defenses May Contain Weaknesses One could argue that fraudsters’ tactics are not novel and that investing in specialized products with machine learning and artificial intelligence should solve the issue of fraud. But somehow fraudsters still manage to outsmart security defenses. In a recent discussion that F5 Labs had with the head of the…
Read MoreBanking has undergone some huge transformations over the last decade as it becomes more embedded in consumers’ everyday lives. In the last year alone, technology adoption in banking has accelerated at an unprecedented rate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A testament to this India, where digital payments over the unified payment interface (UPI) increased from…
Read MoreFraud has become a pervasive part of the discussion around cybersecurity. In part, this reflects a change in attacker motives, as cyber-attacks were not always as vicious as they are now. From the 1980s into the early 2000s, hacking was not really about profit. It was primarily about achieving fame in the hacker community by…
Read MoreBots are not new. Attackers have used bots to achieve scalability in a variety of attack techniques for decades, and defenders have been fighting bots, to varying degrees of success, for just as long. However, two events in 2022—the prolonged acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, with its attendant discussion about exactly how much of…
Read MoreNeutral/Mixed Intentions Many of the actors in this system are neither completely benign nor completely malicious. Some of these practices are bifurcated into legal and illegal practices, such as the rather obvious distinction between criminal and benign payment facilitators. Some of these provide services that can genuinely be used either way, such as reshipping services…
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 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 MoreIntroduction This is the fourth article in our series on fake account creation bots. The previous articles have introduced these bots, described how they work. and discussed the motivations behind their use. We also covered the negative impact that fake account creation bots have on different kinds of businesses and why business and security leaders…
Read MoreIntroduction Over the past few months, F5 Labs has presented a series of articles on fake account creation. We’ve covered why fraudsters create fake accounts and how automation is used to create fake accounts at scale. These articles have described how these fake accounts can negatively impact businesses, but also how security professionals identify fake accounts and leverage security controls to stop bots running fake…
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