Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Scalper bots, or inventory hoarding bots, are used to disrupt, manipulate, and steal merchandise much faster than any human can. These malicious bots add products to carts, often products that are in high demand or limited supply. This stock is held in a basket and made unavailable to other prospective buyers. Scalper bots perform this process multiple times, causing significant problems for websites and retailers, by hijacking inventory and reselling the items at a higher price.

Cyberthreats have been coming at us from the left, right, and center. The number of cyberattacks is forever on the rise, and companies need to keep ramping up their security measures to protect themselves. It’s important that these measures cover every aspect of a network environment. To understand why monitoring your whole environment is so important, let’s take a look at what an attacker might do once they get inside your organization.

Cyber-attacks against maritime and shipping organizations are only increasing. Notwithstanding the IMO’s requirement for organizations in this sector to achieve cyber resilience by 2021, more and more entities are being crippled by malicious attacks.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a favorite method for attackers to disrupt or debilitate firewalls, online services, and websites by overwhelming systems with malicious traffic or transaction requests. DDoS attackers accomplish this by coordinating an army of compromised machines, or 'bots', into a network of devices they control from a remote location that focus a stream of activity toward a single target.

A report revealed that scammers requested funds in the form of gift cards in two-thirds of business email compromise (BEC) attacks. For a phishing trends report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), APWG member Agari examined thousands of BEC attacks that occurred in the second half of 2020. It found that 66% of them involved gift cards. By contrast, direct bank transfers factored in just 18% of attacks, followed close behind by payroll diversions at 16%.

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.