28/08/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 28/08/2024 14:04
As consumer shopping behavior continues to trend towards the convenience of online retail, e-commerce businesses have had to contend with the growing sophistication of cyber threats that target these consumers and online businesses alike. One of the most prevalent and damaging threats is in the form of malicious bots. These automated programs can wreak havoc on an e-commerce platform, impacting everything from inventory management to customer experience.
With the easy availability and adoption of Generative AI tools by hackers, modern bad bot attacks are far more sophisticated, aggressive, and persistent than ever before. Combined with the advancements in modern cloud computing, the increasing frequency, scale, and variety of such attacks, often using malicious botnets have made it imperative for
e-commerce businesses to shield their online stores from these digital threats.
Bot attacks have long been a thorn in the side of e-commerce platforms. With the growing number of shoppers regularly interacting and sharing their data on retail websites combined with high transaction volumes and a growing attack surface, these online businesses have been a lucrative target for cybercriminal activity. From inventory hoarding, account takeover, and credential stuffing to price scraping and fake account creation, these automated threats have often caused significant damage to e-commerce operations. By using a variety of sophisticated evasion techniques in distributed bot attacks such as rapidly rotating IPs and identities and manipulating HTTP headers to appear as legitimate requests, attackers have been able to evade detection by traditional bot detection tools. However, the adoption of advanced generative AI tools by attackers to optimize these malicious bot operations has raised the stakes significantly.
For bot operators, generative AI tools have democratized access to advanced programming and hacking capabilities, and they are now leveraging these technologies to considerably enhance their attack strategies:
With the evolution of Generative AI models and its increasing adoption by bot operators, bot attacks are expected to become even more sophisticated and aggressive in nature. In the future, Gen AI-based bots could be able to independently learn, communicate with other bots, and adapt in real-time to an application's defensive mechanisms. Such evolved threats would require bot management solutions to adopt a proactive mitigation approach through far more advanced AI-powered capabilities of its own.
Bots now account for nearly 50% of all internet traffic, but all bots are not inherently bad - search engine crawlers and e-commerce recommendation bots, for instance, serve valuable purposes. For high traffic volume assets like e-commerce platforms, the ability to accurately differentiate between good and bad bots at scale and effectively mitigate advanced bot attacks is a critical competency for smooth business operations. For vulnerable retailers, the consequences of such sophisticated bot attacks are severe and has the potential to impact their bottom line and undermine crucial sales periods with attacks that result in:
Account Takeovers: Attackers can deploy bots to effectively automate, and scale credential stuffing attacks aimed at account takeovers. By using Generative AI tools to prepare strategies based on successful breaches and analyse large volumes of stolen credentials, attackers can launch attacks with greater precision, efficiency, and scale.
Inventory Hoarding: Advanced bots can deplete stocks of high-demand items, preventing real customers from making purchases, leading to user frustration and damaged brand reputation.
Skewed Analytics: AI-optimized bots can mimic human behaviour so convincingly that they skew marketing data and business intelligence without triggering traditional bot defences. High volumes of bot traffic can also distort web analytics, leading to misguided business decisions.
Content & Price Scraping: Advanced bots that use AI-powered algorithms can enable more sophisticated data interpretation and adjust to website changes dynamically, to monitor content changes and undercut a competitor's pricing strategies.
Payment Fraud: Sophisticated bots can bypass traditional bot defences and be used for fraudulent activities including credit card fraud and gift card abuse, leading to chargebacks and financial losses.
Performance Degradation: Large-scale, AI-enhanced bot attacks can detect vulnerabilities across applications at scale or overwhelm servers with requests, causing site slowdowns or crashes during critical sale periods.
Fake Account Creation: Gen AI can be used to automate the creation of fake accounts by generating realistic usernames, email addresses, and other personal details. This increases the volume and frequency of fake account creation, making it harder to detect and prevent.
To combat these evolving threats, e-commerce businesses need to adopt equally capable bot management solutions that offer:
The exponential rise of AI-enhanced attack techniques in recent years is a turning point in the bot management landscape for the E-Commerce industry. Businesses must recognize that traditional defences are no longer sufficient, especially with the growing adoption of Generative AI by bad actors to spin up sophisticated zero-day attacks or to debug and relaunch malicious bots at a rapid pace. By embracing a far more capable AI-powered security solution and adopting a proactive, adaptive approach to bot management, online retailers can protect their platforms, preserve customer trust, maintain the integrity of their digital platforms, and stay compliant with the latest cyber security regulations
The battle against bots has entered a new phase, and e-commerce businesses must evolve their defences accordingly - the future of e-commerce bot protection lies in fighting AI with AI.