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.

Major eCommerce businesses experienced technical difficulties on their websites during Black Friday 2019. And this isn’t something retailers can afford, when Black Friday is traditionally the day retailers roll out their biggest online discounts. As Black Friday approaches, many websites will see a spike in traffic which means an increase in bot activity. Are bots hiding in your holiday traffic?

So far in our blog series, we have discovered that there is a high understanding of the threats that bots cause across all industries. We recently carried out a survey of 200 UK enterprises across e-Commerce, financial services, entertainment and travel. In part three of our blog series, we discussed how bots are affecting different industries. There is very little need to explain to businesses that bots can be a problem.

We recently carried out a survey of 200 UK enterprises across e-Commerce, financial services, entertainment and travel. In part two of our blog series, we discussed the current state of bot attacks. As we continue our blog series, we investigate how bots are affecting different industries. We surveyed enterprises in the industries we saw as the most at risk.

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.

Credential stuffing is one of the most common forms of online crime, it is the act of testing stolen passwords and usernames against website login forms, to validate the credentials for malicious reuse. Once a match is found, the attacker can easily commit various types of fraud. When credentials are stolen through a database breach, malware, or other means, they are kept for use in future attacks against many different targets.

In 2020, the chances of falling victim to data breaches are increasing. Keeping customers in the loop can be costly, time-consuming but very necessary and important to help prevent loss of personal data and decrease the risk of fraud. Cyber-attacks and data breaches can rarely be kept quiet and if the incident occurs at a high profile organisation, it’s only a matter of time before it makes the news.

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.