Bot Mitigation: Put Your Defense Up When Your Site’s Under Attack

Bots can carry out high-volume, automated attacks to your site with malicious intent. Here at YOTTAA where we specialize in e-commerce site performance, one of the things that we see given our visibility into site traffic on over 1,500 e-commerce sites, is that 40% of internet traffic is bots — and sometimes even more per site. Bots create a drain in resources and skew site data, but can also be very harmful by stealing site information, products, and shopper data, among other things.

We partner with PerimeterX to take on e-commerce bot threats because of their advanced threat detection capabilities, along with our ability to quickly add their technology to our customers’ sites. In this post, we’ll discuss the dangers of bot attacks, and what your brand can do to protect your site performance, your revenue, and your shopper data.

Bot Threats: What Are They?

Bots have a wide range of offenses they commit on e-commerce sites; some can be more of an annoyance while others can cause financial harm to shoppers and brands. Here are a few examples of bot threats:

Account abuse:

Account abuse is when bots hijack user accounts or break into a site’s login page to steal shopper credentials. The goal is to commit fraud or place orders using the stolen account information.

Hoarding:

Having a limited edition product release? A hoarding attack is when bots lock up products in carts, artificially depleting availability, frustrating customers and reducing sales. Bots can also grab all of the products and attempt to resell them at a profit.

Scraping:

Your site’s data is not safe. Bots constantly scrape your prices, product reviews, and inventory data for competitive-enabling intelligence.

Carding:

In carding attacks (also known as carding fraud), cybercriminals use bots to test lists of recently stolen credit card and (Read more...)