Bot Attacks Methods for Business Two-Thirds of internet traffic consists of bot traffic. Out of this bot traffic, 40% are bad bots. The rise of malicious Bot Attacks targeting your Business has caused an increase in automated attacks.
Without bot detection and mitigation software, attacks can often go undetected. And by the time you figure out what’s going on, it can sometimes be too late.
The good news is that bot mitigation software can help protect your business against sophisticated attacks. Here are the major categories of attacks software can help you prevent.
1. Account Takeovers
Data leaks are becoming a more frequent problem. Surfshark says 174.4 million users were breached in 2020. This increased to 214.4 million users in 2021.
Breached information gets sold on the dark web. Hackers purchase login credentials and use bots to take over accounts. Their targets include social media, finance, travel, retail, and eCommerce sites. Attackers later sell this information at a profit.
Bot mitigation software can help prevent account takeovers. It blocks suspicious automated login attempts. It detects sophisticated bot attacks with machine learning, collective intelligence, and behavior modeling techniques.
2. Card Cracking
Bot Attacks targeting your Business are also known as card testing. Card cracking involves a brute force attack. It uses bots to find missing values of stolen debit or credit card information. Bots will test the information by making small transactions.
The Federal Trade Commission says consumers reported losing more than $5.8 million to fraud in 2021. This is an increase of over 70% over 2020.
3. Credential Stuffing
Bot Attacks targeting your Business detection and mitigation software are also crucial for protecting against credential stuffing.
Credential stuffing is where attackers use lists of breached user information. The idea is to see whether they can log into a specific user’s accounts across different platforms since many users use the same usernames and passwords for most of their accounts.
As noted above, breached credentials are becoming more common. Suppose one of your accounts is hacked. There is the possibility that many more will be hacked. And that poses a great threat to individuals and organizations.
4. Fake Account Creation
Stolen identity information can also be used for fake account creation. This involves the use of automated bots. The bots can create many fake accounts rapidly. User information is usually extracted from fake registration web forms.
But why do this in the first place? Attackers can abuse this data to:
Take advantage of multiple free trials
Resell subscriptions or free trials on third-party websites
Bomb review sites with favorable or negative reviews
Orchestrate money laundering operations
Skew analytics (for competitive companies), so they can’t use their data for better decision making
5. Content Scraping Attacks
Scraping attacks are usually used against companies. The goal is to gain competitive intelligence. Whether it’s next year’s product range or pricing strategy. Some people would love to get their hands on this information.
To make matters worse, these attacks are usually planned out in detail. Thus, they evade traditional firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and other technologies.
The right bot detection and mitigation software, though, can block scraping attacks in real time.
6. Content Spam
A lot of work goes into ranking in search engines. Many businesses rely on their search engine visibility to drive business. But what if your rankings suddenly crashed? What if you couldn’t immediately identify the cause?
It often takes six to 12 months to see any results from search engine optimization (SEO). It could take even longer to recover a ranking after It’s been meddling with.
The definition of content spam is a form of negative SEO. It’s where attackers use your content on other websites without your permission. This will affect your brand as well as your website’s reputation.
7. Server Overload Attacks
Server overloads happen frequently. For instance, users rush to take advantage of a Black Friday sale on a major eCommerce platform. It can crash the server. Server crashes can result from user error too.
Traffic spikes, broken code, and configuration errors are often responsible for server overload. But another major cause can be bad bots. Because bot traffic looks like regular traffic, it can be hard to detect without bot detection software.
8. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Distributed denial of service attacks is just as they sound. They intend to make a service inaccessible. Usually, this is borne out by overloading the system’s resources.
For instance, a competitor may want your site down while running a promotion. A successful DDoS attack would cause you to lose revenue. It could affect your relationship with customers too.
Bot detection software can block bad bots and secure all endpoints.
Conclusion
As bots get more capable, so must your bot protection strategies. Traditional security solutions like reCAPTCHA and blunt force protection are not complete solutions for smarter bot attackers. Advanced bot detection software is now critical to your cybersecurity strategy.
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