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Amazon Prime Day: Prime Time for Automated Fraud

Amazon Prime Day: Prime Time for Automated Fraud

The newest international holiday is likely to attract not only record sales but also record levels of malicious traffic.

Summer is here and Amazon Prime Day is around the corner. Deals are being leaked and media coverage is ramping. The shopathon that Bezos built has become a genuine retail holiday, eclipsing other more traditional holidays in sales activity. This also makes Prime Day more important to all retailers, as the entire e-commerce universe reacts to the gravitational pull of a holiday powered by Amazon’s promotional might.

Retailers Must Be Ready to Defend Well Before Prime Day

Just as they need to ready deals and promotions to compete for shopper mindshare, e-commerce retailers should also ready themselves for a wave of automated fraud attacks. In fact, they had better be ready before Prime Day hits. That’s because over the past year a new pattern of elevated fraud attacks emerged around every holiday period. Driven in part by the rapid growth of e-commerce activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, cybercriminals have doubled down on malicious holiday hacking. Now it’s the new normal.

Over the course of 2020 the PerimeterX research team tracked automated attacks closely to gain intelligence and understand emerging trends. We compiled this research into the Automated Fraud Benchmark Report — E-commerce Edition. In creating our report, we analyzed and identified significant fraud attempt spikes around every major holiday. This included Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and, for the first time, the Fourth of July.

Attacks Starting Earlier As Fraudsters Test And Prepare

For most holidays, the fraud attacks began a few days before the holiday itself. For the Cyber 5 period, the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, which sees the highest volume of fraud attempts, the probing began nearly two months prior with notable spikes in malicious (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/2021/amazon-prime-day-prime-time-for-automated-fraud/