At 8:00 on Saturday, 31st August 2024, millions of people were poised to be part of pop culture history. Four days earlier, on 27th August, seminal Britpop heavyweights Oasis shocked the music world by finally confirming their long-awaited reunion. The reconciliation of brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher sent fans into a frenzy. For millions worldwide, it was essential to get tickets to one of the 17 announced gigs. The demand was enormous.

Welcome back to the next blog in our Evolution of Scalping series. During our last blog we covered the landmark case that exposed the power of automated purchasing – Wiseguy Tickets. We detailed their operation and their use of bots, which allowed them to snatch up huge volumes of available tickets for high-demand events.

Welcome back to our Evolution of Scalper Bots series. In part one, the Origins of Scalping, we started our journey through scalping’s long history. We saw that it is far from a new concept: people have been reselling high-demand items for centuries, from as far back as 325 BCE! We’ll continue our journey at the turn of the 21st Century. With the advent of online ticketing, a new frontier had just been opened for scalpers, and things would never be the same again.

In recent weeks we’ve covered how criminals use bots to steal accounts across the web. Credential stuffing tools make this easy and quick to do. If you missed it, watch a live demo of the process in this webinar. In this post we’ll look in more detail at what happens next. How do criminals monetize stolen accounts? To answer this, we’ll use the example of streaming services – one of the quickest and easiest commodities for crooks to shift and make a quick profit.

Attackers and bot authors are continually evolving their methods, shifting their focus beyond just websites. With websites often having a reasonable level of protection, malicious actors are increasingly targeting less-protected areas, namely APIs, with their bots. This blog post delves into the evolving threat landscape. We’ll focus on how attackers exploit APIs and IoT devices to launch attacks like credential stuffing, using streaming services as a prime example.

In the evolving landscape of online ticketing and eCommerce, few technological developments have been as controversial as scalper bots. These automated programs, designed to purchase high-demand items faster and more efficiently than humans could, have transformed the way we buy and sell coveted goods online. During this forthcoming blog series, we are going to explore the fascinating evolution of scalper bots. We will trace their origins, developments, and impacts across several distinct eras.

Streaming services are one of the most popular targets for cybercriminals. Using automated bots, attackers steal millions of streaming accounts each month. Adversaries quickly sell these via illegal marketplaces to make massive profits. Although any streaming service is vulnerable to account takeover and credential stuffing attacks, there are additional risks and damages when live event streaming is on offer.

In part one of our “Follow the Crypto” series, we highlighted the growing need for cryptocurrency investigations in the fight against fraud. We discussed the hurdles that investigations face, from the anonymous nature of transactions to the complexity of analyzing blockchain data, but also noted some famous successful investigations.

Business leaders often see security as an insurance policy – a box that CISOs need to tick just in case the organization comes under attack. This make it difficult for InfoSec decision makers to justify the cost of upgrading defenses. After all, we already ticked that box – right? But when it comes to automated attacks, it’s not a matter of “if” bots will target your business. It’s not even a question of “when”.

Nowadays, cryptocurrency is a buzzword in society. It’s mostly seen as a high-risk investment or associated with fast profit-making schemes. Despite this, its adoption has surged in recent years, and according to crypto.com, the number of cryptocurrency holders has now hit 580 million. Unfortunately, not all of them hold it for legitimate reasons. We are at a juncture where criminals have the knowledge, services, and tools to channel their illicit profits through cryptocurrencies.