A self service online Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) traffic management platform that increases ROI, protects customer information and helps meet PCI compliance by mitigating malicious bots and human fraud before they can infiltrate your ecosystem.
Generating in excess of $4 Billion annually in the US alone, the online classifieds sector’s growth and size has made it a lucrative target for malicious activity. Vulnerabilities lead to listing manipulation and ATO’s at the point of login.The rich customer data is extremely valuable on blackmarkets. Agility in this steadily growing market requires malicious bot management investments to be made in robust, easily implemented and resource efficient solutions like Pristine Traffic’s Classified Ad bot and fraud Mitigation platform.
Residing at the edge of network, our Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation 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.
Your verified access list (your "pristine traffic") determines which bots and human traffic sources can visit your site and by auto-generating blocking rules we're able to stop the bad bots before they reach your website.
Our Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation Machine Learning engine provides you with the real-time insight you need to ensure that the only traffic coming to your site is "pristine traffic".
Filtering Your Unwanted and Malicious Bot Traffic So That Only “Pristine Traffic” Remains
Very simply, we provide you with a dedicated Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation 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, they 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.
our self service platform offers…
Pristine Traffic is a month-to-month Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation service and may be cancelled at any time prior to the next month's billing.
Automated protection for customer websites and APIs from potential malicious bot threats 24/7
All visitor traffic is run through our machine learning, multi-factor authentication engine. This 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".
The Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation platform allows companies to ensure they have comprehensive policies in place across all internet visitors - both human and bot
Our Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation utilizes customized ML models to feed into visitor analytics across the enterprise
Pristine Traffic works seamlessly with Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and Firewalls, such as Amazon AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare without an install.
Our classified ad bot and fraud mitigation integration is at the edge of the network, with your existing WAF, DDos and other security layers.
Saves on CPU and hosting / bandwidth requirements due to blocking unwanted Bot traffic.
Supports real-time automated bot detection and classified ad bot and fraud mitigation with full Access and Identity Management for Bots to clean up legacy access control lists
Pristine's Classified Ad 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
Pristine Traffic's Classified Ad bot and fraud mitigation filters ensure you never block a good bot again
Content Scraping
Web scraper bots are deployed to automate the process of reading a site’s content. This activity is both beneficial and harmful to classified ad sites.
The Benefits.
Classified ad sites benefit from scraper bots initiated by search engines, aggregation sites and social media platforms deploy these bots to automatically obtain and summarize content to their site visitors and customers. This provides classified ad sites with SEO rankings, site traffic, branding exposure and revenue opportunities.
The Threats.
Competing classified ad sites also utilize web crawler bots to obtain comparison data and listing. This makes it easy for rivals to steal customers by offering more attractive alternatives, undercutting special offers and garnering auxiliary sales that they would not otherwise make.
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.
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.
Cybercriminals don't initially target specific sites. For classified ad site attacks, hackers may have lists of hundreds of thousands or even millions of customer details. They'll target sites' login pages and payment gateways in an attempt to gain access to accounts and to test which records in their database are valid.
The Classified Ad sector is under constant threat from malicious activity including…
A form of ID theft, ATO's access a classified ad site's accounts by credential stuffing in an attempt to obtain PII data and customer credentials. When successful, its very costly recover from ATO initiated breaches.ATO 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.
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.
Stolen credentials, linking username and password combinations, from a previous data breach are loaded into a credential stuffing tool and deployed against a specific classified ad site to see which combinations work. Even with minimal success, the hackers manage to take over a large number of accounts.
Fake classified ad accounts and fraudulent form fills can lead to a myriad of problems for the site including: performance issues, taxing the email server, excessive server requests for pricing and auction bids. Identification of authentic requests becomes problematic, time consuming and costly to resolve.
Payment gateways are the conduit to the merchant account providers, banks, payment networks and third-party partner applications. They're designed to facilitate an accelerated, digital acceptance and movement funds for their customers and end users. 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.
Classified ad sites contain a substantial amount of listing information, Bad bots can scrape all of the listing 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 often to be purged manually, increasing customer support and administrative costs.
Classified ad sites with online bidding or auction platforms are targeted by shill bidding bots which submit automated bids. By waiting until the last instant, the bots are able to purchase at the lowest price possible. This disrupts the natural bidding process.
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.
