Tag: Reseller Bots
Introduction Black Friday has long been a cornerstone of the retail calendar, not just in the United States but around the globe. During this period, including Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, consumers anticipate steep discounts and rush to purchase products both in-store and online. However, these low prices also bring about a surge in unethical…
Read MoreThis particular sneaker bot was creating accounts steadily over time to reduce the chance of them getting detected and the accounts being suspended. Accounts are created in advance of the shoe drop and resellers will populate the account profiles with details such as payment cards and delivery addresses that will be used to checkout. This…
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 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 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 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 MoreDuring the reconnaissance period there were low levels of automated activity associated with resellers testing and configuring their bots in preparation for the January 11th sale (see Figure 1). Once the sale starts, the sale event period is categorized by a drastic spike in automation against the “add to cart” flow within the first few…
Read MoreAfter analyzing traffic from 159 bot defense customers, this review found that in the absence of a bot defense solution, Mobile APIs experience significantly more automation than Web applications. However, once a bot defense solution is deployed in mitigation/blocking mode, we see a reversal, with Web having higher levels of persistent attacks despite consistent mitigation.…
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