We recently carried out a survey of 200 UK enterprises across e-Commerce, financial services, entertainment and travel. Amongst our objectives, we wanted to discover the state of bot attacks in the surveyed industries. We now know that many businesses use some sort of bot mitigation, and the few that don’t are in the process of doing so. In part 2 of our blog series, we find out which bot attacks represent the greatest risk to businesses.

Data breaches are becoming increasingly common, with cyber criminals able to gain quick and easy access to usernames and passwords. Despite efforts to inform consumers about cybersecurity best practices, many still use the same weak passwords across multiple accounts. Netacea, along with independent researchers Coleman Parkes, recently carried out a survey 200 UK businesses to discover how well the bot threat is understood across travel, entertainment, e-commerce and financial services.

Recently, it has been reported that Netflix has gained 16 million new sign-ups due to lockdown. This is no surprise with more people than ever being at home as a result of COVID-19. Streaming services are in high demand, this means increased sign-ups, and with more customers signing up, this increases the probability of account takeover attacks and fake account creation. With the current demand being so high for streaming services, we look into the main threats streaming services could face.

Web scraping uses bots to collect large amounts of data from websites. Quite simply to extract content and data from a website. Data that’s publicly available. The scraper bot can then duplicate entire website content elsewhere. Scraper bots, most of the time, are not always bad. Bots are constantly at work behind the scenes making our digital lives run smoothly. They are usually looking for information that you are freely giving to your website’s visitors.

Loyalty schemes operated by the eCommerce industry have become so popular that they now represent a billion-dollar industry, with customers earning loyalty points when purchasing goods or services from their favourite brands. Yet financial losses from loyalty card fraud are equally significant — with an estimated $1 billion being stolen every year.

No one wants to be a victim of payment card fraud, yet more of us are falling foul to the myriad of techniques used by hackers to steal payment card information and use it for their own gain. To mitigate this malicious activity, it is vital that eCommerce sites apply security measures that protect consumers and sellers alike from carding and other major bot threats.