In 2020, scalper bots made headlines by hoarding PlayStation 5 consoles. Lockdowns and online-only sales allowed bots to dominate the market, leaving frustrated consumers empty-handed. Today, scalper bots are even more dangerous. Criminal groups behind these operations have evolved. They are organized, professional, and focused on more sustainable targets: low-value items in massive quantities.

The battle between bots and anti-bot tools is a relentless arms race. Bot operators constantly develop new ways to outsmart defenses, and defenders adapt to counter those tactics. As one side evolves, the other quickly follows suit. This ongoing conflict has grown more intricate over the years. Initially, bots mimicked traits like browsers, IPs, user agents, and mouse and keyboard inputs used by human visitors. These tricks sufficed to bypass primitive defenses.

Since the early days of the World Wide Web, automated scripts known as bots have been crawling cyberspace, collecting data for various purposes. Initially, these bots were designed to be helpful, cataloging information much like search engines such as Google and Bing do today. However, the volume of automated requests has grown significantly. Today, bots account for a substantial portion of web traffic, costing businesses considerable resources to handle unwanted or malicious requests.

Welcome back to The Evolution of Scalper Bots series. In our previous blog, we analyzed the rise of professional scalper bot ecosystems. This included cook groups, bots-as-a-service platforms, and retail scalping’s emergence. As technical advancements drove fierce competition, we unraveled the complex dynamics of this controversial industry.

As Black Friday approaches, retailers are gearing up for the inevitable surge in online traffic. But cybercriminals are also preparing for this high-stakes season, fine-tuning their bot attack strategies to exploit inventory, pricing, and customer accounts. To shed light on these threats and what retailers can do to prepare, we consulted five experts from Netacea who shared their insights on the bot attack landscape during Black Friday and beyond.

Welcome back to our Evolution of Scalper Bots series from the Netacea Threat Intel Center. In our previous blog, we reviewed the early days of anti-bot legislation and its limitations, especially around ticket scalping. Traditional defenses like CAPTCHA quickly became insufficient, which spurred the development of bot management solutions.

Bot attacks are evolving to become more sophisticated. Attackers have built businesses around the data and assets they extract with bots, so they constantly seek ways to bypass defenses. Developers work tirelessly to assess bot defenses and find new methods to evade them. Traditional, client-side defenses are visible to attackers, making it easier for them to bypass. But even advanced defenses must stay alert, embedding bot expertise to keep pace with these evolving tactics.

Welcome back to our Evolution of Scalper Bots series. In our last post, we explored how scalper bots expanded into new markets from 2010 to 2014. We saw the scalper bot industry rise and a technological arms race begin between developers and retailers. As we delve into the period of 2015 to 2017, this battle intensifies. Scalper bots become more sophisticated, retailers implement new countermeasures, and legal challenges emerge.

Content scraping is on the rise. While it can benefit your business in some cases, it can also lead to lost revenue, degraded website performance, and content theft. Web scraping is a hot topic in tech news. This trend links to the rise in AI tools, specifically LLMs (large language models), which rely on content to generate their outputs. They scrape content from across the web to train these algorithms. This is a controversial subject with moral, technical, and legal implications.

As a security professional considering a robust bot defense strategy, it’s important to understand the ever-evolving nature of bot threats and the critical need for a scalable, robust solution. Traditionally, businesses rely on agent-based bot management solutions, also known as client-side or front-end detection, by deploying small pieces of software (agents) on customer devices to detect malicious activity. However, these approaches carry significant risks.