How the Bot Stole Black Friday

In the shopping season, Black Friday is like Christmas haunted by the digital Grinch. You need to take timely measures to avoid losing a solid piece of the profit pie, letting down your clients, and getting into extra troubles.?

What the heck??

Since the beginning of November, Qrator Labs has noted an increased intensity of bot attacks on the retail sector. The most affected industries of the online retail universe are pharmaceuticals, home improvement goods, household appliances and electronics. Indeed, Black Friday’s in danger, but there’s more…?

In anticipation of special offers and all that jazz, there’s always a growing demand for open data — the faster it changes, the more expensive it is. And November has always been a hot-sales month, followed by Christmas and New Year promotions, discounts, and raffles. During that time, malicious bots fly like moths into the light of digital shopaholism.

Your typical bot attack?

Behind any site, there is a server or many of those responsible for the network bandwidth. When just people use your website, the servers are okay with processing their requests. But there is another story with a DDoS attack.

One bot makes only 2-3 requests per minute, but one bot is not a warrior in the cyber field — from 3 to 5 thousand fellows appear with it to create a wave of requests to overwhelm the system for at least 20 minutes. Or 2 hours. In the meantime, your website and mobile app are hounded by parasite traffic, your users are experiencing slowdowns and errors — and users unhappy with their experience don't hesitate to leave bad feedback in the app stores and look for alternatives on the market.

Who needs it?

• As mentioned above, your competitors would love to throw bot sand into your Black Friday machine. This game, of course, is not that fair, but amid buying activity, few remember fair play rules. Moreover, sometimes they win situationally when you happen to be attacked.?
• The attack can also be a cyber prank of novice hackers. After all, practice makes it perfect. Here, you may get lucky and the pranksters will leave you alone after the first successful attempt.?
• You may become an extortion victim. And no matter how it ends, the damage will be done. By paying once, you risk becoming a favorite target of hackers.
• Besides, sometimes cybercriminals perform DDoS attacks just as a distraction, while stealing your users’ personal data. This leads to huge reputational losses and long-term consequences.

Bot Attacks to Expect?

Scraper bots

Those are the bots that went over to the dark parsing side. They search for information in the online catalogs for the content scraping sake. And we solemnly swear, they are planning not only a prank.

To begin with, unique content from your site can be copied to the third-party resources. And what happens to the sites filled with such content? They are consigned to search oblivion. In addition, this kind of attack allows hackers to create phishing pages that are difficult to distinguish from real ones.

Scraper bots may go further, imitating human behavior interactions with digital resources. They add products to the carts until there’s nothing left to buy on your site. Meanwhile, the abundance of bot requests open doors for the ill-mannered guests — 502 Bad Gateway and 503 Service Unavailable.

Plus, a server crash can occur at any stage of the customer journey. Someone at this moment will pay for whatever they choose to buy. They will have to endure some stressful minutes, or even hours, figuring out whether the payment went through or the money was lost forever.

The cherry on top are the cloud servers you might use. Such servers require payment for each request. Smells like ouch, doesn’t it?

Credential stuffing

Credential stuffing is when a cyber crook comes with an already phished database and tries to log in to your clients’ accounts. Yet again, no manual work — numerous bots instead.

The server load will be combined with the real users, making futile efforts to log in. Moreover, imagine the impact if even a few accounts succumb, betraying their owners’ payment information.?

Is it really that bad?

Hm, let’s check:

? Lost profit and extra financial losses?

? Crazy analytic metrics due to weird bot activity on the site

? Wasted budgets of third-party sellers and business partners

? Overload of support mailboxes with complaints

? Exile from search engines’ first pages

? Loss of customer loyalty

Yep, it is.?

Can I avoid it?

Increase your alertness, warn employees, and throw an invisibility cloak over IP addresses. And, best of all, purchase protection from specialized cybersecurity service providers. This is exactly what will pay off.

No black sails during big sales!

Bot Protection with Qrator Labs service: https://qrator.net/en/solutions/botprotection