APIs served as part of web and mobile applications are vital to enabling customers to interact with your business. However, it’s important to understand the impact on your business when these APIs are used in new, non-standard and potentially unintended ways. While APIs are usually written and intended for use with certain frontends (i.e. web application or mobile app), they are served publicly on the internet and are open to inspection by any interested party.

Bots are evolving dramatically and becoming more sophisticated and launching ever more complex and targeted attacks at ever increasing rates. This makes detecting bots more important than ever but also more difficult than ever. Bots of the more recent generations are harder to identify without expert bot detection tooling. These bots could put businesses at risk of exposure to threats such as scraping, carding, and credential stuffing.

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.