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COVID-19‘s Impact on Business: Travel Bouncing Back, and so are the Malicious Attacks

After a significant drop in web traffic to near standstill on travel and hospitality websites during the first weeks of the eruption of COVID-19 early in March, the industry is recovering, led by local holidays and vacation travel. This change is indicated by a strong recovery of car rental services in the US, as well as a partial recovery in the lodging segment, including hotels, short-term rentals and other accommodations. Both segments cater to people sheltered in place for long periods of time and looking for alternatives to the traditional vacation flight, by driving and renting vacation units (houses, apartments or rooms) for short and long periods of time.

Car Rental Services Are Recovering

During the first weeks of the pandemic’s impact on the car rental industry, car rental services looked for large parking lots to store their fleet of unutilized cars. Looking at parking lots where rental cars are stored, we can see that rentals are on the rise (figure 1). Looking at car rental web traffic, it is evident that there is a recovery of organic “legitimate” users represented by a growth of 285% from the April 1 low point to date. This increase in users is accompanied by an increase in competitive scraping bot requests which almost doubled during the week of April 20 and spiked during the last week of April for a staggering overall increase of 544%, and stayed steady at that level since (figure 2).

Del Mar Fairground’s parking lot in San Diego on April 2 (before) and on June 7 (after)

Figure 1: Del Mar Fairground’s parking lot in San Diego on April 2 (before) and on June 7 (after), indicating recovery and better utilization of fleets by rental car companies.

US market car rental web traffic

Figure 2: US market car rental web traffic

When looking at the sources of the scraper and malicious bot traffic targeting US car rental services, we see that besides (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from PerimeterX Blog authored by PerimeterX Blog. Read the original post at: https://www.perimeterx.com/resources/blog/2020/covid-19-s-impact-on-business-travel-bouncing-back-and-so-are-the-malicious-attacks/