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.
The positive potential impact of bots…
The negative potential impact of bots …
Scraping bots continuously probe digital publishing sites for new content. These bots are deployed by:
Cybercriminals who steal the content and duplicate it on another website.
Competitors who monitor site's activity and use it to their advantage.
Negative Impacts:
Loss of Traffic
Unattributed, republished content can inadvertently flag the content's origin site as the "duplicated" content, rather than as the content source. This can result in SEO ranking penalties by the search engines, significantly decreasing organic traffic from genuine customers.
Expense
Legal action against the plagiarized content site can prove costly and time consuming.
Malicious bot cause an increase in a site's server requests, slowing the site's load time, even crashing the site if the requests overwhelm the server.
Negative Impacts:
Cost Increases
Infrastructure costs increase due to bot traffic that utilize server resources.
Loss of Customers
Real human visitors don't wait for slow sites to load, each additional second of page load time results in additional user abandonment.
Drop In Human Traffic
Google and other search engine algorithms are weighing site speed more significantly, resulting in decreasing human traffic to slower sites.
Malicious bots generate fake registrations and form fills, create fake listings and steal exclusive listings from portals.
The Negative Impact:
Non Human Leads Waste Agent Time
Registrations create follow up pipelines that get assigned to agents. Fake registrations that appear real waste agents time and loss of revenue.
Loss of Revenue
Wasted effort on bot generated leads and exclusive listings that are stolen result in revenue loss that can prove significant in scope.
Damage To Brand Reputation
Bot fraud can lead to a negative impact on the site's brand reputation that is difficult to rebuild.
Traffic from malicious bots can skew website analytics by artificially boosting visitor levels to specific sections of the site.Google Analytics and Audience Insights may be inaccurately reporting true site analytics. Decisions resulting from these inaccuracies may negatively impact marketing, ad spend and company financials.
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 e-commerce attacks, hackers may have lists of hundreds of thousands or even millions of credit card details. They'll target sites with payment gateway in an attempt to hijack the gateway to see if which cards in their database are valid. Allowing automated bots to access the payment gateway URL creates malicious activity opportunity.
bad bot attacks fall into two types: generalized bots which look for vulnerabilities to exploit first and when found, custom bots are then written to specifically target your website.
"Generalized Bots" are the much more common bots. Often attackers will use them as a site penetration test to see how difficult it is to penetrate a site's initial security layer. If their bots successfully breach a site's defenses, attackers will be much more likely to prioritize the site as candidate for writing a custom bot. This enables attackers to allocate their resources against websites that have proven easier to compromise.
"Custom Bots" are typically written to attack sites that have been successfully penetrated by generalized bots. Because they're written to attack a specific website, they require more resources and have limited use (they only work on your website). Since they're built for specific attacks, they often cause the most damage. A verified access list provides a simple and cost-effective way to protect your online business.
constant threats to your organization from malicious bot activity include…
Customer portals provide a communication ecosystem, connecting customer and their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) to a 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 Organizations.
Smaller organizations are particularly susceptible to data loss as a result of malicious attacks because they rely upon cloud-based, applications, mobile applications and widespread use of API's services.
Compromised Passwords.
Compromised passwords increase the threat of sensitive customer financial and personal data theft. The threat from cybercriminals who are actively looking to exploit financial data is a significant concern.
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.
Sites containing pricing data that bad bots can scrape, even without compromising the shopping cart or checkout platform, are targets for competitors and cybercriminals who launch bad bot attacks to steal pricing and shipping rates. Bot activity can cause checkout, shopping cart and payment processing downtime if not blocked.
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.
When malicious bots are aggressively deployed against a site, the site's performance is impacted, as pages take longer to load. The customer experience is compromised, damaging the site's brand reputation and often resulting in lost revenue. A prolonged impact upon site performance can negatively impact the site's SEO rankings.
Malicious bots can cause havoc for management because they can skew Profit and Loss (P&L) numbers and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). As a result, decisions made are based upon inaccurate data, creating a feeling of flying blind. Not only do bad bots from scraping and ATO activities drain organization's resources, even greater strain is experienced as the numbers being relied upon no longer reliable. Cash flow, receivables, payables are often impacted immediately. Longer term, projections, customer service, IT and human resource departments are often impacted.
Payment gateways are a site's conduit to the merchant account provider or bank. They're designed to make the acceptance of credit cards, debit cards, eChecks, ACH and alternative forms of payment easy for the online merchant to accept. Inadequate defenses against malicious bot activity can flood the payment gateway with authorization attempts which can overload the payment gateway, leading to declined transactions and lost sales. In extenuating circumstances, the gateway provider, processor or bank can suspend or even terminate the merchant's account.
Sites that utilize a shopping cart are particularly vulnerable to malicious bots that can impersonate buyers and add items into the shopping cart, removing them from inventory. Competitors using bots can make purchasing more difficult for legitimate customers by tying up the shopping cart. Bots can be used to lock product launch and special offer pricing on the website. Then the competitor can organize a flash sale on social media for the same special pricing on their site. By diverting the target site's buyers to their site, they pocket the price differential. Shopping cart abuse can also be used to impact advertising and click-throughs by showing a particular product or offer is "sold-out" on the targeted e-commerce site, but available on a competing site.
A form of ID theft, ATO's access a 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.
APIs have become commonplace across many sectors. Bad bots exploit API endpoints to gain access to sensitive data. Hackers deploy malicious bot attacks to scrape APIs looking for vulnerabilities. API security is often neglected by companies that rely upon simple authentication or limiting IP access instead.
Stolen credentials, linking username and password combinations, from a previous data breach are loaded into a credential stuffing tool and deployed against a specific site to see which combinations work. Even with minimal success, the hackers manage to take over a large number of accounts.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks flood sites with a high volumes of traffic. The surge in traffic creates significant loading time delays for customers, users and site visitors. In a worst case scenario, these attacks can crash a site completely. DDoS attacks are used by hackers to disrupt competitor websites. When DDoS outages occur, customers lose trust in the reliability of a company and go to competitors who have better DDoS mitigation practices.
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.
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.
Multicloud threats include having to secure data in multiple locations, which increases the number of potential attack profile targets, compared with a single cloud infrastructure.
Having to monitor multiple clouds simultaneously can become an overwhelming task for a CISO and IT staff. This could lead to untimely vulnerability patching, exposing vulnerable health data to malicious attack.
Most ransomware attacks through 2021 have targeted PHI and PII data. But as technology advances, the healthcare system may soon face ransomware attacks on life-saving equipment and technology.
In 2020, 92 separate ransomware attacks affected more than 600 separate healthcare organization and over 18 million patient records. The estimated cost of these attacks was nearly $21 billion.*
* Comparitech analysis.
Connected medical devices can make up as much as 74% of the devices on a hospital’s network and are typically invisible to legacy endpoint and network security solutions.
The risk to the global healthcare system is increasing as more connected medical devices are deployed throughout the industry,
Attackers focus on exploiting device and network vulnerabilities.
Several cases have occurred in which attackers directly compromised a medical device as part of overall campaigns against hospitals.
Unique Vulnerabilities
1. Regulatory Approved Connected medical devices simply cannot support a security agent installation.
2. These devices are often managed and secured by a different team in the hospital from the rest of the data network where traditional IT management and security resides.
3. Network security used by the data network and assets (laptops, desktops, mobile devices, servers) generally can’t recognize medical device traffic and as a result, offer little protection.
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.
Classified 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.
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.
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.
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 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".
Filtering Your Unwanted and Malicious Bot Traffic So That Only “Pristine Traffic” Remains
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, 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 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".
Allows companies to ensure they have comprehensive policies in place across all internet visitors - both human and bot
Ensures you never block a good bot again
Customised 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.
Integration is at the edge of the network, with your existing WAF, DDos and other security layers.
Pristine Traffic automatically identifies visitors with a higher Propensity to Purchase (P2P). This helps increase conversions through the sales pipeline, increasing customer ROI.
Saves on CPU and hosting / bandwidth requirements due to blocking unwanted Bot traffic.
Supports real-time automated bot detection with full Access and Identity Management for Bots to clean up legacy access control lists
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
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.
