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Airline
Bot and Fraud Mitigation

A self service online Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) traffic management platform that increases ROI, protects traveler Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and helps meet PCI compliance by mitigating malicious bots and human fraud before they can infiltrate your ecosystem.

Airline Industry Cybersecurity

Airlines have their hands full in this new post-pandemic world of travel. The industry must deal with unprecedented challenges relating to cybersecurity priorities that have been understandably neglected, airline bot and fraud mitigation among the most pressing. Agility in an unpredictable market requires malicious bot management investments to be made in robust, easily implemented and resource efficient solutions like Pristine Traffic.

Good v Bad Airline Bots

Who's Actually Visiting Your Website?

Who's Visiting Your Site Without Pristine Traffic
Who's Visiting Your Site With Pristine Traffic

How Pristine Traffic Works

Our airline bot and fraud mitigation process…

Residing at the edge of network, our AI engine reads your weblogs and performs multi-factor authentication on each site visitor and bot, comparing them to our database and categorizing which bots are visiting your site and why.

Pristine Traffic (Verified)

Your verified access list (your "pristine traffic") determines which bots and human traffic sources can visit your site and by auto-generating airline bot and fraud mitigation blocking rules, we're able to stop the bad bots before they reach your website.

Visitor Optimization

Our airline bot and fraud mitigation machine learning engine provides you with the real-time insight you need to optimize your sales pipeline to ensure that the only traffic coming to your site is "pristine traffic".

visitor authentication process

Our 4 Stage Pristine Traffic Process

 Filtering Your Unwanted and Malicious Bot Traffic So That Only “Pristine Traffic” Remains

Pristine Traffic How It Works Site Graphic

Why Pristine Traffic?

Very simply, we provide you with a dedicated subscription service that only allows the bot visitors you want onto your web site, so you can deal with the others. Once you have locked down your website to prevent these unauthorized bot visitors and utilize Pristine Traffic’s airline bot and fraud mitigation hackers won’t be able to report any vulnerabilities back to the cybercriminals. While our service can’t protect you from every single attack, it is a cost-effective and vital first layer of protection. Just like the car thief – they will move onto an easier target.

The Pristine Traffic Platform Offers:

our self service platform offers…

Month to Month

Pristine Traffic is a month-to-month, airline bot and fraud mitigation service and may be cancelled at any time prior to the next month's billing.

24/7 Protection

Automated protection for customer websites and APIs from potential malicious bot threats 24/7

Edge Of Network Blocking

All visitor traffic is run through our machine learning, multi-factor authentication engine. Our airline bot and fraud mitigation process ensures that unauthorized bots are blocked and potentially malicious bots identified at the network edge, before they reach a website. What remains is a site's "Pristine Traffic".

Establishes Internet Policy

Allows companies to ensure they have comprehensive policies in place across all internet visitors - both human and bot

Customized Modeling

Customized airline bot and fraud mitigation ML models to feed into visitor analytics across the enterprise

Easy Integration

Pristine Traffic works seamlessly with Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and Firewalls, such as Amazon AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare without an install.
Our airline bot and fraud mitigation integration is at the edge of the network, with your existing WAF, DDos and other security layers.

Reduction of Resources

Airline bot and fraud mitigation Saves on CPU and hosting / bandwidth requirements due to blocking unwanted Bot traffic.

Clean Up Legacy Systems

Supports real-time automated bot detection with full Access and Identity Management for airline bot and fraud mitigation to clean up legacy access control lists

Non-Network Load

Our airline bot and fraud mitigation is an Out-of-Line platform (edge of Network) that causes no network slowdowns, and doesn’t add another layer of risk, or require major infrastructure changes e.g. DNS

Ensures Good Bots Access

Pristine's airline bot and fraud mitigation ensures you never block a good bot again

Airline Industry Malicious Bot Attacks

An Increase In Malicious Activity Generally Coincides With An Increase In Travel Demand

Cybercriminal activity in the airline sector is anticipated to spike as the industry begins to recover from the pandemic. As bookings increase, hackers will be increasing their site crawling activities, looking for vulnerabilities and easy targets.

Recovering from attacks is time-consuming, resource draining and costly during normal times. With many travel organizations facing financial difficulties, cybersecurity neglect is bound to catch up with many of these organizations.

Price Scraping…A Double Edge Sword
Web scraper bots collect pricing and fare information. This activity is both beneficial and harmful to airlines.

On the one hand, airlines benefit from these scraper bots. Aggregation and booking sites employ these bots to automatically obtain pricing and fares from participating travel sites. Increased bookings from these aggregation sites represent a substantial revenue channel for many airlines. With revenue based upon the aggregation site’s sales performance, airlines can defray direct sales costs.

Competitors also utilize web crawler bots to obtain price comparison data. This makes it easy for rivals to steal customers by offering lower price alternatives, undercutting special offers and garnering auxiliary sales that they would not otherwise make .

Availability Scraping…Similar To Price Scraping But With Additional Problems
No only do web scraper bots collect pricing and fare information, they also collect availability information. This activity is both beneficial and harmful to airlines.

The Benefits. Web scraper bots provide authorized aggregation and booking sites the ability to automatically obtain availability information from participating travel sites. Many airlines rely upon these sites for bookings.

The Threats. Competitors and hackers use web crawler bots to not only obtain availability information, but also to damage an airline’s brand reputation and customer experience by holding reservations, reducing availability and slowing the booking reservation engine.

How Malicious Bot Attacks Work

Hackers will deploy generalized bots, which perform a scan of a website and online infrastructure looking for vulnerabilities they can penetrate. On the surface, these “crawler bots” appear harmless, behaving in a similar manner Googlebots. They simply crawl a site, page by page reviewing its content. This first stage, reconnaissance work, enables cybercriminals to automate their penetration testing in bulk. The resulting vulnerabilities are categorized and targeted through custom bots designed to penetrate the specific vulnerabilities.

Bot Attacks Are Automated

Attackers use generalized bots to crawl websites in bulk. They simply load domain names into their crawl scripts. These scripts automatically identify and catalog site vulnerabilities. The bots move on from sites they cannot readily penetrate, those without easily identifiable vulnerabilities. This allows hackers to focus their attention on the easier targets.

Login And Access Targeting

Cybercriminals don't initially target specific sites. For airline attacks, hackers may have lists of hundreds of thousands or even millions of passenger details. They'll target airline sites' reservation pages and payment gateways in an attempt to gain access to passenger accounts and to test which records in their database are valid.

Airline Industry Malicious Bot Threats

Airlines are under constant threat from malicious activity including…

Account Takeover Attempts

A form of ID theft, ATO's access a site's accounts by credential stuffing in an attempt to obtain PII data and steal loyalty program data such as reward points and air miles. ATO's activity includes:
Password Re-use
using the compromised password from one site on another site
Credential Stuffing
bulk attempts to gain access to user accounts)
Malware
that interferes with user sessions
Remote Access
gaining control of a user's device
Induced Payments
users are tricked into initiating a fraudulent payment
When successful, ATO's are very costly for a healthcare organization to resolve.

Credential Stuffing

Stolen credentials, linking username and password combinations, from a previous data breach are loaded into a credential stuffing tool and deployed against a specific travel website to see which combinations work. Even with minimal success, the hackers manage to take over a large number of accounts.

Email Phishing Attacks

Bots are used to detect email addresses contained on a site's webpage copy. Next, the bots will attempt to determine the organization's email format by examining the email records. For example: [email protected]. If successful, the bots then gather the names of the organization's employees from the about us, contact us and staff pages. From there it's easy to automatically compile a directory of the organization's employees and their emails. These emails are bulk validated through readily available, inexpensive third-party services before the emails sent. This simple, automated process allows cybercriminals to launch successful phishing attacks.

Content Scraping

Airline sites are full of products, services, incentives, advertisement, downloadable content, warnings, tips, resources and advice. Bad bots can scrape all of this content for malicious use. Attackers can steal a site's information and sensitive data. Not only are these bad bots stealing proprietary data, the activity sucks up the site's bandwidth. This, in turn, slows down the site's performance, which can cause downtime and additional overhead if not blocked.
Content scraping bots often create fake registrations and form fills. These need to often be purged manually, increasing customer support and administrative costs.

Aggressive Site Scraping

When malicious bots are aggressively deployed against a travel site, the site's performance is impacted, as pages take longer to load. As a result the customer experience is compromised, damaging the site's brand reputation and lost revenue, as well as negatively impacting the site's SEO rankings.

Ticket Spinning

This practice involves a hacker holding tickets for a period of time to see if they can resell them for higher margin.This prevents real customers from being able to purchase the same tickets. This tactic is used as a type of denial of service attack as well.

Passenger Portal Attacks

Passenger portals provide a communication ecosystem, connecting passengers and their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to the travel company's network. Inadequate defenses against malicious bot activity can flood the portal with authorization attempts which can overload it, leading to declined access, compromised records, posting inaccurate transactional information, record editing or record deletion.

Smaller Airlines.
Smaller airlines are particularly susceptible to data loss as a result of malicious attacks because they use cloud-based services with remote back-up systems to protect from accidental or intentional deletion.

Compromised Passwords.
Compromised passwords increase the threat of sensitive healthcare data theft. The threat from cybercriminals who are actively looking to exploit travel data is a significant concern.

Payment Gateway Attacks

Payment gateways are the conduit to the merchant account provider or bank. They're designed to make the acceptance of credit cards, debit cards and alternative forms of payment easy for the travel site to accept. Inadequate defenses against malicious bot activity can flood the payment gateway with authorization attempts which can overload the gateway, leading to declined transactions, lost revenue, disputes, cancellations and damage the customer relationship. In extenuating circumstances, the gateway provider, processor or bank can suspend or even terminate the organization's accounts.

Look-To-Book Skewing

Look-To-Book ratios measure the number of people visiting a website compared to those who make a purchase. Scraper bots increase the number of web requests which negatively impacts this ratio.

Denial Of Inventory Attacks

DOI attacks are most commonly targeted towards travel industry. An holds back an item from inventory (tickets, reservations, bookings, etc) but they're not going to actually complete the purchase.
Human Impersonation.
In a DOI attack, the bot pretends to be a customer, creating a reservation, but rather than paying for it, the transaction is on hold, for up to 20 minutes typically, allowing for time for the perceived customer to complete payment. The hacker uses this 20 minute hold period to try and resell that booking by marking up the price on another site
Simultaneous Bot Attacks.
By utilizing multiple bots simultaneously, the hacker increases chances for success, by account for reservations they weren't able to resell within the holding period.
Bots React Faster Than Humans.
These DOI attacks get even worse. Since the bots react faster than any human can react, the hacker is able restart the whole process again.

Airline DOI

Meet Your Dashboard

Pristine Traffic Dashboard

Once Pristine Traffic is active, your dashboard allows you to easily see all the legitimate activity of the bot visitors. After activating your verified watch list, Pristine Traffic begins blocking unwanted traffic and fake bots. Utilizing our Ai and ML engines, our platform ensures bad bot visitors are stopped and pristine traffic, good traffic allowed in.

"Great app for designing interfaces like never before."

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