As we all prepare for a new life after Covid-19, more businesses than ever are looking at expanding their digital presence and making online their number one channel. Despite this, many are unaware and ill-prepared for the threats facing them as we all transition to a “new normal”. Thanks to the rollout of vaccines, the threat of Covid-19 is steadily diminishing and businesses are set to resume normal service.
Countless phishing attempts are made every day, and with Covid-19 causing many organisations to move to remote working, phishing attacks have massively increased over the last year. In fact, last year’s Phishing and Fraud Report found that phishing incidents rose 220% during the height of the global pandemic compared to the yearly average.
Protecting yourself when paying online is very important. It’s a scary thought, but fraudsters have lots of ways to sneak in and steal credentials, bypass security and make victims of online shoppers. As we have discussed previously on this blog, criminals don’t just rely on traditional “hacks” to exploit technology. Increasingly, bad actors are using sophisticated bots to exploit business logic in order to breach security and carry out attacks.
On 16th March Netacea sponsored the virtual Cyber Security Digital Summit where, alongside speakers from Blackberry, Thycotic and Disney, Netacea’s Head of Threat Research, Matthew Gracey-McMinn hosted a session for attendees. During the showcase, Matthew explored “Lessons Learned From An Invite Only Bot Group & Developing A MITRE-Style Framework for Bots”.
In our recent webinar Netacea’s Head of Threat Research, Matthew Gracey-McMinn and Head of eCommerce, Thomas Platt, delved into the top threats set to shape the bot landscape in 2021. 2020 saw an increasing number of bot-based attacks as everything moved online. From online shopping to working from home, the pandemic has changed the way we interact, communicate and consume. As internet activity increased, so did the opportunity to exploit users.
Content scrapers are automated bots that steal your content from websites and mobile apps for their own use without permission, usually for malicious purposes. Content scrapers typically copy all the content from a webpage and portray it as their own content. Bots can scrape all of the content on a website in a matter of seconds, even for large websites such as eCommerce sites with thousands of product pages. These bots can scrape public website information such as text, images, HTML and CSS code.
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is designed to prevent bots or spam attacks from accessing a webpage. Traditionally users were tasked with typing text from a simple image, but over time CAPTCHA has evolved into more complex images and voice recognition in response to the increasing sophistication of attacks.
In our previous blog, we discussed scalper bots, what they are, what they do and the impact they’ve had on the latest PS5 launch. We are now looking into the industry surrounding these bots, and delving into who exactly uses scalper bots and why.
Scalper bots are designed to automatically purchase online goods. Generally, they do this by adding a product to a cart and completing the checkout process far faster than any human could hope to do so. They exploit vulnerabilities in websites to purchase goods before they are even listed as available to the usual human users of a website. Those using scalper bots have a huge advantage over non-bot users when it comes to purchasing limited-quantity items.
Scraper bots are commonly used to acquire prices and content from websites for competitive advantage. Aggressive scraper bot activity slows down websites for customers, resulting in a bad user experience that costs the retailer revenue as frustrated customers are driven to competitors, while exposing vital pricing data.
