As a result, botnet detection has become a pressing concern in the cybersecurity field. Unfortunately, many companies are not even aware of how growing this threat actually is. According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, “Cybercrime is predicted to cost the world $8 trillion USD in 2023”.

From small businesses to large corporations, nobody is immune to these attacks. Therefore, it’s important for the business world to enhance awareness of this topic. By adopting appropriate knowledge and measures, companies can stay alert and block botnets before they can cause damage such as data breaches, click fraud, malware, and other cyber attacks.

Understanding Botnets. How do they work?

Before we dive into the best practices for botnet detection, let’s first briefly review what bots and botnets are. We will explore how they work, what they can do, and how to deal with them.

What is a bot?

A bot, short for “robot,” is a software program that runs automated tasks on the internet. Bots can be used for various purposes, including web crawling, indexing, and automation. 

However, when a bot is designed to perform harmful activities, it becomes a threat to the internet’s security. Hackers can create malicious code that mimics human behavior and do repetitive tasks. For example, they watch YouTube videos, click on ad links, or engage with social media content to boost numbers.

What is a botnet?

Multiple bots grouped together and working toward a single purpose form a botnet. So, basically, a botnet is a network of computers that have been infected by malware and are under the control of a single attacker or “botmaster.”

A botnet is created when malware is installed on a large number of devices, such as computers, smartphones, or any other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These IoT devices refer to any digital device (from smartwatches to smart home devices) that can connect to the internet and share or exchange information to make our lives easier.

The infected devices are also known as “zombie devices” or “zombies”. They can be used to form a network of bots (botnet) or a “zombie army.” Each bot within the botnet can affect thousands of devices, which makes the botnet even stronger and more dangerous.

So we can imagine the kind of damage the “zombie army” can cause if not stopped in time.

How do botnets work?

Botnets work on their own until they communicate with a command and control (C&C) server. This C&C server, as well as the entire botnet, is controlled by a single person, known as a “bot herder” or “botmaster”. The botmaster commands all the bots to carry out attacks or other malicious activities. This person acts remotely, sending updates to infected machines and manipulating their actions.

Botnets may not show any malicious behavior until they are commanded to attack and the owners of the affected devices are usually unaware of this. There are two ways a botnet can be dangerous to your business.

First, it can infect one or multiple devices in your network and use it as part of a botnet. You won’t even notice that your device is used to perform malicious and fraudulent activities online.

Second, it can use its combined power to target your business. This can include distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which can disrupt your operations. For example, a large number of bots can simultaneously flood a target server with traffic, overwhelming its capacity and causing it to crash. This can lead to significant downtime, loss of real traffic (and with this revenue), and damage to the business’s reputation.

Understanding how they work and their potential impact is essential in preventing and detecting botnet attacks. In the next section, we will explore the common types of botnets and how they operate.

Types of botnets and botnet attacks

Botnets come in different types, and each type is designed to carry out specific malicious activities or botnet attacks. Here are some of the most common types of botnets and their associated attacks:

1. DDoS botnets: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) botnets are designed to conduct DDoS attacks. These attacks involve overwhelming a website, network, or servers with traffic from multiple sources, causing it to crash or become inaccessible. Cybercriminals use DDoS attacks to extort money from businesses or as a distraction while they carry out other attacks, such as data theft or malware installation.  

2. Click bots: Click bots are used for Click Fraud and Ad Fraud. This is a type of online fraud that involves clicking on ads to generate revenue for the attacker. Click bots can also engage with competitors’ ads or generate fake clicks. This way, advertisers are spending their advertising budget ineffectively and have inaccurate traffic statistics.
   Advertisers themselves, as well as Google through its Google Ads platform, are trying different botnet detection techniques to mitigate them. However, Click Bots use advanced algorithms, which make them harder to be detected.   

3. Scraper bots: Used for content scraping and stealing personal information. Some botnets are designed to scrape content from websites or steal personal information, such as login credentials or credit card details. The stolen information can be used for identity theft or sold on the dark web.

4. Scalper Bots: Scalper botnet attacks are designed to quickly purchase large quantities of high-demand products. The goal of the botmasters is to then resell these products for a much higher price and earn a profit. These kinds of botnet attacks are commonly used for tickets and events, major retail sales, e-commerce stores, and limited edition items.
   One notable incident with scalper bots occurred not too long ago, causing “ticket chaos” for Taylor Swift’s concerts.
5. Spam bots: Spam bots are used to send out email spam messages or phishing emails. Phishing emails are designed to trick recipients into revealing sensitive information or downloading malware onto their devices. Spam bots can send out millions of emails in a short period, making them a powerful tool for cybercriminals.

How to prevent botnets from affecting your business

Now that we have covered the different types of botnets and their associated attacks, it’s time to focus on the most important part – how to protect your business from botnets. Botnet attacks can be very harmful, but they are preventable if you follow good security practices. Here are some ways you can protect your business from botnets:  

Develop good security practices

One of the best ways to protect your business from botnet attacks is to develop good security practices. This involves securing all your devices, network infrastructure, and software against vulnerabilities. Ensure that you have a robust antivirus and firewall system in place and that you keep all your software and operating systems up-to-date with the latest security patches.   

Use 2FA

Two-factor authentication (2FA) is an additional layer of security that helps prevent botnet malware from breaking into devices and accounts if a password has been compromised. By using 2FA, you will be required to enter a one-time code or confirm login attempts from a trusted device, making it difficult for hackers to gain access to your accounts.

Provide cybersecurity awareness and regular training to your users/staff

Cybersecurity awareness is essential in preventing botnet attacks. Educate your employees on how to identify phishing emails, suspicious attachments, and links. Provide regular training and reminders to your staff on cybersecurity best practices, and establish policies for safe internet usage.

Don’t open suspicious email attachments or links

Botnet malware is often distributed via email in the form of attachments or links. If you receive an email that you suspect is phishing, do not open any attachments or click on any links, even if they appear to be from a trusted source. Always scan attachments with antivirus software before opening them, or hover over the link to check the URL before clicking on it.

Regularly run ad traffic and network traffic analysis

Botnets can generate a lot of network traffic, which can indicate botnet activity. Use a network monitoring tool (Google Analytics could be useful too) to detect any unusual network activity, and regularly monitor ad traffic for any suspicious activity. 

Update operating system

Botnets often target vulnerabilities in operating systems. Ensure that all your devices have the latest security updates installed. These updates often contain security patches that fix vulnerabilities that can be exploited by botnets.

By following these best practices, you can help prevent botnets from hurting your business. Keep in mind that botnet attacks can be very damaging, and it is essential to take a proactive approach to protect your business from them.

Botnet detection – practical techniques

Botnet detection is no easy feat. As we can see in this article, botmasters are constantly innovating and refining their techniques. Their main interest is to remain unnoticed, and they’re creating increasingly complex botnets to achieve that.

Despite it being a challenging task, botnet detection isn’t a mission impossible. Of course, the easiest and most effective way is to use specialized botnet detection tools. ClickCease for example can automatically block botnet attacks on your website, keeping it safe from fraudulent and invalid visits.

However, there are still some practical techniques that you can employ without the use of a tool. Several indicators can be a sign that your computer is part of a botnet or your business has been attacked by a botnet in any way.

We have categorized these indicators into three main categories, depending on the nature of the attack: 

How to tell if you’re part of a botnet?

If you’ve ever wondered how to detect a botnet on your computer, these several signs can show you if it’s been infected with a bot:  

• Slow computer: One sign that your computer might be part of a botnet is that it is running slowly, as the botnet could be using your system’s resources.
• Battery drain faster than usual: Botnets can consume significant resources from your device, which can cause a faster battery drain than normal usage patterns.
• Suspicious processes or programs: Check for suspicious processes or programs running on your device. For example, you can notice new apps that you haven’t installed before. If you don’t recognize them, it’d be good to investigate their origin and purpose.
• Unusual high usage of cellular data: The malware in your device can use its cellular data to communicate with the C&C servers. If you notice a sudden increase in your cellular data usage, despite not changing your usage patterns, it could indicate a botnet infection.
• Unusual system behavior: Any atypical activity on your device that deviates from its usual patterns, such as unexpected shutdowns, system crashes, or unusual error messages. These behaviors can indicate a potential botnet infection.
• Changes to browser settings: Botnets can manipulate browser settings. If you notice changes without any input from you, it could be a sign of a botnet infection.
• Unusual pop-ups: Pop-ups with ads appear on different screens and apps where you have never seen them.
• Spam emails and messages: If you receive spam emails or messages from your own or other email addresses, or if your contacts receive suspicious messages from you, it could be a sign of botnet activity. Botnet could use your device or email address to send spam or phishing messages.

Signs that your business is a target of a botnet

When it comes to the question “How to detect a botnet attack on your business?”, you can keep track of these few signs:

• Unusual time for activity:  If you notice activity at unusual times, such as outside of regular business hours or during low-traffic periods like holidays, it could be a red flag that your business is under attack.
• Slow network performance: A slow network or internet connection could be a sign that your business is under a botnet attack, as the botnet could be consuming network resources.
• Unexplained data transfer: Unexplained data transfers or suspicious connections to unfamiliar IP addresses could indicate a botnet attack on your business.
• Unusual network activity: If you notice unusual network activity, such as spikes in data usage or connections to unfamiliar IP addresses, it could be another sign of botnet activity. 
• Unauthorized access to systems or data: If you notice unauthorized access to your systems or data, it could mean that a botnet has compromised your business’s security.

Signs that your paid or organic campaigns are affected by a botnet

And lastly, you can notice if your paid ads or website are being affected by click fraud botnet attacks by paying attention to these signs in your analytics:

• Unusual click-through rate (CTR): If you notice that your ads are receiving significantly higher CTR than usual, it could be a sign of a click bots attack.
• High bounce rate: A high bounce rate on your website could also indicate a botnet attack, as the botnet could be visiting your website without any intention of engaging with your content.
• Low conversion rate: A botnet traffic could lead to a low conversion rate, as the botnet may not be interested in purchasing your product or service.
• Traffic spikes: Sudden spikes in traffic to your website or ad campaigns could be a sign of botnet traffic.
• Location ‘Not Set’: If your analytics show many visitors with location “Not Set”, or geo-locations you don’t target or don’t have business with it could indicate a botnet attack, as botnets often use IP addresses with fake locations.
• Repeated site visits from the same IP: Repeated visits to your website from the same IP address could mean that a botnet is targeting your ad campaigns.
• Unfamiliar useragents or old devices: Presence of unfamiliar useragents in your website analytics or a sudden increase in old devices you don’t usually see in masses could indicate a botnet attack.
• Faster spend of ad budget without engagement: Your ad budget can be exhausted at a faster rate than usual. If this is not followed with a corresponding increase in engagement with your site most likely your ads are affected by botnet clicks.
  

To go a step further with botnet detection efforts for your website or paid campaigns you can check out ClickCease. It will automate this process, providing comprehensive and full protection. By blocking malicious clicks from your ad campaigns, or any other form of fake traffic on your WordPress site, you can ensure that you’re spending your budgets and time on real, human traffic only.

So if you want to have a clear picture of your marketing efforts and take your botnet detection strategy to the next level, try ClickCease with the free trial.

Get your free trial here

FAQs

What is a botnet?
A botnet is a network of computers that have been infected by malware (bot) and are controlled by a single attacker or “botmaster.” Each infected device, known as a “zombie” is part of a “zombie army” and works toward a single malicious purpose.

What are some botnet detection methods?
The most effective way to detect and block botnets is through the use of botnet detection tools like ClickCease. Some manual methods that you could use without a tool involve regular monitoring of your device and network activity to detect unusual patterns. This can include tracking network traffic, examining system logs for signs of suspicious activity, or tracking user behavior to identify anomalies.

How to detect a botnet on your computer?
A few signs can show that your computer or network has been infected with a bot:

– Slow computer
– Battery drain faster than usual
– Suspicious processes or programs
– Unusual high usage of cellular data
– Unusual system behavior
– Changes to browser settings
– Unusual pop-ups
– Spam emails and messages

How to detect a botnet attack on your business or campaigns?
There are several indicators in your network or traffic analytics that your business has been targeted by a botnet attack:

– Unusual time for activity
– Slow network performance
– Unexplained data transfer
– Unusual network activity
– Unusual click-through rate (CTR)
– High bounce rate
– Low conversion rate
– Traffic spikes
– Location ‘Not Set’
– Repeated site visits from the same IP

The post The Ultimate Guide to Botnet Detection: Best Practices appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

With a simple purchase of fake streams from streaming farms, it’s way easier now for artists to rank higher on the charts and gain more fans.

Without even mentioning it, we can only imagine the significant increase in revenue they receive from the royalties generated by all these streams.

And this is actually the most common reason why some artists decide to ‘invest’ in fake streams.

So let’s dive deeper and see what streaming farms are, how they work, and what they are used for.

What are streaming farms, and what are they used for?

Simply put, streaming farms are a network of devices, such as smartphones or computers. Their main goal is to play a specific song or piece of music to create the appearance of a large number of online listeners. These devices imitate human-like online listens and artificially increase streaming numbers.

This way, big artists and labels can fake their numbers on online streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, or Deezer and appear more popular than they really are. By doing so, these artists can stay on top of the charts and create music hits, which in return, of course, generates higher profits.

And here raises the question – are these artists and labels going against the principles of fair competition?

The practice of using stream farming gives artists an unfair advantage over smaller ones who may not have the ability or do not want to compete in this way. As a result, the music of smaller artists may remain undiscovered.

Let’s imagine that an artist has invested a huge amount of time to produce a quality piece of music in some genre. Another artist has a song that should be consumed by the same audience, but this artist uses a streaming farm to increase its popularity.

The higher number of streams then influences the streaming algorithms to recommend the song to real listeners, leaving the song by the other artist at the bottom. What this also leads to is that listeners may be presented with music that is less relevant to their preferences.

This way, streaming farms are not just disrupting fair competition but also are affecting the overall quality of the listening experience for users.

Cause and effect: The rise of online streaming and fake streams

Streaming services have undoubtedly played a crucial role in the survival of the music industry. In the past decade, the global revenue generated by sales of physical music products has decreased by a significant 35%.

However, the rise in popularity of online streaming has been staggering, and according to some music industry stats, now 65% of its revenue is coming from streaming platforms.

Usually, most of the streaming platforms have a free version, and there are paid versions as well. The paid versions are ads-free, and the platform earns money from monthly subscriptions. However, the vast majority of people use the free version. For it to remain free, they need to show advertisements.

So, same as social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, streaming platforms also charge a certain amount of money for the number of ads shown.

On the other side are the artists and other rights holders who publish their work on Spotify or any other popular streaming platform. They earn from them through streaming royalties, which are payments made to them based on the number of times their music is streamed on the platform. 

Naturally, the more streams an artist’s music receives, the more money they earn in royalties. And this is where the demand for streaming farms comes into play. Many artists turn to these shady boosters to artificially increase their streaming numbers and revenue.

Are music streaming farms illegal?

We’ll keep it short here. Yes. Similar to bot farms (which can be detected and blocked by ClickCease, as well as another type of farm fraud, click farms), they can harm healthy analytics on a huge scale and are affecting both advertising numbers and revenue streams for artists.

With the use of bot listeners on streaming platforms, advertisers are still paying for ads played to users who are not actually people. This leads to inflated numbers, ineffective use of advertising budgets, and a lack of accurate data.

Another major problem is that music labels and artists can make money from fake listeners of their music. While platforms like Spotify pay between $0.003 – $0.005 per stream, thousands of bot listeners can be purchased for less than a dollar.

Using music streaming farms violates Spotify’s terms of service and can result in penalties such as account suspension, legal action, and damage to an artist’s reputation. Ultimately, artists who use streaming farms steal money from the platform and other artists who will be paid less.

While Spotify and a few other streaming platforms have started including terms and conditions to take action against bot streams, it’s important for the industry to remain vigilant and prevent these fraudulent activities from occurring in the first place.

The controversy surrounding streaming farms

The use of streaming farms has become a major point of controversy within the music industry, raising ethical, financial, and legal concerns that demand closer examination.

When undetected, these fake music streams can create a distorted picture of an artist’s popularity and artificially inflate their streaming numbers. This affects the artists themselves and harms the credibility of the streaming platforms.

Streaming farms usually offer their services in the form of marketing activities focused on improving the promotion of artists’ songs or albums. Artists who use these forms to boost their streaming numbers easily rise in popularity. However, the level of this popularity is debatable. 

They can’t ignore the fact that part of the streams come from the streaming bots they have paid for. Another part is that their music is recommended to real listeners due to the high number of streams. And it doesn’t have to mean that these real listeners actually like the song but have been just trapped within the auto-suggestion loop.

Nevertheless, some artists and labels don’t even care about organic fans. All they really need is the revenue they receive from the royalties. This way, they are taking the money away from other artists whose music might be much better but is suppressed thanks to the fake numbers of their competition.

This leads us to the conclusion that streaming farms can cause several negative effects, including:

• Misrepresentation of audience
• Unfair revenue distribution of royalties
• A distorted picture of the popularity
• Ineffective advertising on streaming platforms
• Unethical competition
• Harming streaming platforms’ credibility
• Manipulating trends in the music industry

In this era where online streaming dominates the music industry, it’s crucial for artists, labels, and streaming platforms to work together to combat artificial streams and promote authenticity, fairness, and transparency.

The future of stream farming

The rise of music streaming platforms has completely revolutionized the way we consume media. One of the latest trends in the music industry is that the number of accounts on streaming platforms (both paid and free) is continually growing.

For example, the number of paid subscribers quickly jumped to 616.2 million people globally in 2022. This is an increase of 93 million from 2021. Digital streaming holds 65% of the total revenue in the music industry for 2022 and is projected to reach 31.4 billion by 2027.

With this exponential growth, there’s no doubt that the streaming farms will try to catch up with the trend and simultaneously secure their growth. As the number of listeners on streaming platforms continues to grow, the competition among artists to maintain their top positions may become increasingly intense. In this fierce battle for attention, some artists will likely turn to alternative ways of boosting their streaming numbers.

This will lead to even more expressed negative effects in the industry, from misrepresenting audience and popularity to distorting revenue distribution and manipulating trends, increasing disappointment among the artists.

And who knows, it’s highly possible that this can also negatively affect the quality of the music we listen to, even though many of us will agree that this is already happening, especially in the past decade.

Bottom line

Essentially, a streaming farm is just a place with many digital devices. Each device is logged into a different account on one or more streaming platforms, and those streaming bots are used to play music 24/7.

Due to that, they directly impact the streaming numbers and manipulate the charts and playlists. This results in unfair competition among artists, affecting the discoverability and visibility of legitimate artists who are not using such tactics.

Additionally, fake listeners are generating higher revenue for artists and labels that use this fraudulent activity. This practice not only cheats the streaming platforms but also harms the overall streaming music industry by distorting data and preventing other artists from getting the recognition and exposure they deserve.

Block fraud with ClickCease. Start a 7-day free trial.

The post What Are Streaming Farms, and Why Are They Controversial? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

And, of this automated traffic, a sizeable chunk is thought to be from bad bots.

For anyone running an online business or managing a website, these bad bots can be more than an annoyance. They can be used to perform a huge variety of malicious activities and damage more than just your website.

So what exactly is a bad bot, and what makes it so bad?

What are bad bots?

Bad bots are automated software programs designed to either defraud or damage internet-based networks. They can be used to perform relatively benign but annoying tasks, such as posting spam comments on websites or social media. Or they can be used to commit serious cyber crimes such as data theft, credit card fraud, or ad fraud.

Modern bad bots also often use machine learning algorithms to help them improve their performance and automate more of their tasks.

However, a bot does need a task master to perform its duties. And this usually comes in the form of either a human controller, or they can also be operated as part of an automated process such as spreading copies of themselves or collecting data via fraud. 

These bad bots have often spread with the help of viruses or other forms of malware. Because bots need a host computer to operate from, they can either be operated from a central location  – for example a click farm or bot farm. 

Or they can also be distributed in data centers or infected devices across the world, creating a network of connected bots, also known as a botnet.

In fact, most bad bots have been found to operate from Amazon Web Server (AWS)and Microsoft Azure data centers.

What are the different types of bad bots?

Bad bots come in a broad range of flavors and levels of sophistication. Many bots are built specifically for a certain type of activity, but they can also be repurposed and used for other forms of cyber fraud at a later date.

And because there is already a huge network of existing botnets, these bad bots can be mobilized easily by willing fraudsters. In fact, these botnets can be hired for relatively low costs on the darknet.

Most bad bot attacks online are done using older botnets as their attack vectors.

The most common types of malicious bots you’ll see online include:

Spam bots

We’ve all experienced spam, often in our inboxes. But spam can be much more insidious than just cluttering up your email. For starters, spam bots can be used by black hat SEO practitioners to post crappy comments with backlinks on websites and forums.

But there are also advanced spam bots that can perform spam injection. This is where a bot accesses your website’s file management system and adds in hidden content such as spam comments, redirects, and even hidden pages.

The aim of this form of spam injection is to generate backlinks for clients or to generate traffic for low-quality sites such as gambling, adult-themed, or narcotics-themed sites. Obviously, this is a hugely disruptive way of adding backlinks and is totally against best practice guidelines. And, for your site, the implications can be hugely damaging, with multiple penalties and the added headache of disruption for you and your customers.

Read more about SEO spam injection here.

Content scraping bots

Some good bots can be used to collect information and data from across the internet, something that would take a human a lot of time. But content scraping bots can also be used to copy or spoof entire websites.

Website spoofing is a common practice used by fraudsters operating phishing scams or fake product scams. By copying your website in its entirety (or even partly), a scammer can deceive your customers, who might not be able to tell the difference.

A common target is popular e-commerce sites, where scammers might want to copy the entire layout and product lines to deceive customers. But content scraping can affect any business, not just those selling products online.

Check out our blog about content scraping.

Fake engagement bots

One of the most common reasons to use bots is for fake engagement, usually on social media. In fact, stats show that many popular influencers have fake followers numbering between 10 to 40% of their total audience.

These fake engagement bots can also be used to view videos on YouTube, watch Twitch livestreams or even listen to music on sites like Spotify. Because the like or view count metrics affect the algorithms on most of these sites, inflating engagement can help boost an account’s popularity – albeit fraudulently.

Fake engagement can also include fake traffic on websites. This is often done to inflate the views or clicks on ads hosted on websites, known as ad fraud.

And the worrying thing is that this fake traffic isn’t even expensive or hard to find. People can generate huge volumes of fake traffic for slightly more than the price of a coffee.

Read more about viewbots and the world of fake engagement on social media

Talking of which…

Ad fraud or click fraud bots

Fake engagement on paid ads is known as click fraud and is thought to affect around 90% of all Google Ads campaigns. There are several levels of click fraud.

Casual click fraud is often carried out by competitors or brand haters who simply click on an ad each time they see it to waste their rivals’ budgets.

Website publishers may also perform click fraud by hiring traffic bots to visit their sites and improve their viewing metrics. This isn’t just for ad revenue but can also be done to dupe partners into thinking the site has a bigger audience than it does, usually to win higher-paying guest posts as part of the problems with domain authority based guest posts.

Organized click fraud, or ad fraud, is where criminals manage a campaign to purposely perform high levels of click fraud for profit. Some of the best known ad fraud campaigns include Methbot, Hyphbot and Drainerbot.

Read all about the ad fraud click bots hall of infamy

Credential stuffing bots

Also known as brute force login bots, or account takeover bots. These bad bots are designed to crack passwords, enter websites and steal data or takeover accounts. A similar type of bot is also used to perform credit card fraud, or carding – a process where multiple payment cards are tried in a short period of time to work out which works.

These sophisticated bots can be used to crack the code in seconds. If you ever wondered why you need to have unique complex passwords for all of your accounts, that’s because credential stuffing bots use commonly used passwords to great success. If your password is ‘admin’ or ‘password’ for any of your logins anywhere, go change that ASAP.

Crypto mining

A case in point of the multi-use botnet is the crypto mining bot. This form of malware is often either injected into websites or web browsers from infected software (often email attachments or bootleg software) and will then remotely mine bitcoin or other crypto currencies for the fraudster.

However, crypto mining botnets are often also repurposed for DDoS attacks or for other coordinated bot attacks. 

Attack bots

Some malicious bots are built specifically for damage and for fraud and extortion. The most infamous of these types of attack bots are those used for ransomware. By accessing a website, ransomware bots can shut down a website and cause huge disruption to business until a (usually huge) ransom is paid.

Estimates of the cost of ransomware attacks put the cost at around $20 billion a year as of 2022. 

Another form of attack on websites is the DDoS or distributed denial of service. By overloading the server with trash bot traffic, a website can be taken offline or compromised. DDoS attacks can be coordinated by fraudsters looking to extract a ransom, or sometimes by malicious individuals simply looking to cause disruption. 

How bad bots get around security controls

Although many platforms use a number of security measures to block bad bot traffic, the truth is that some of the systems are not good enough. For example, although Google uses filters to spot and block fraudulent traffic (invalid traffic as it is called); these bots can get through by changing their IP addresses, mimicking behavior to look like genuine human users and using device spoofing.

Device spoofing allows bots hidden in data centers to appear as if they are mobile devices or desktop computers anywhere in the world. 

Now, with these more sophisticated bots constantly changing and evolving, many of the big platforms are playing catch up. 

And with so much traffic coming from bad bots, this has seen a boom in the bot blocking industry and fraud prevention.

The cost of bad bots to the online economy

The impact of global cybercrime is thought to have cost the global economy between $1 trillion and $6 trillion in 2021.

This includes everything from ransomware to ad fraud.

In fact, ad fraud is the biggest slice of the cybercrime cake, accounting for over $41 billion in 2021. Compare that to credit card fraud which took a relatively modest $31 billion in the same year.

Can you use robots.txt to block bad bots?

As many website owners are aware, the robots.txt command can be used to stop certain bots from crawling or indexing specific pages on your website. So can you use robots.txt to block bad bots?

Unfortunately, no, not really.

Bad bots will often either totally ignore robots.txt, or will use it as a sign to check that page for useful information. So in the fight against bad bots, robots.txt can’t help you…

Block bad bots for better business

The options for blocking bad bots are many and varied. But one thing is clear; businesses need some form of bot protection to safeguard their clients and their own security.

Whether that is stopping scammers from injecting malware or spam content into your website; or preventing fake traffic on your ads.

ClickCease has been blocking malicious bot traffic and fake clicks on PPC ads since 2015 and is now the industry leader in click fraud prevention. But it’s not just about blocking bots from your paid search engine results.

Bot Zapping from ClickCease is a new tool, currently available for WordPress sites, designed to block bad bots and fraudulent direct web traffic. This includes spam bots, credential-stuffing bots, content scrapers, and more.

Block bad bot activity on your website and try ClickCease and Bot Zapping today as part of your cyber security suite.

With a 7 day free trial, you can run an audit on your websites and check the validity of your traffic sources.

Sign up for your FREE trial today.

The post What are Bad Bots and how do they affect your business? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Cyber Monday scams have been around for a long time, but they might be getting a jump in 2022, according to statistics. In 2018, Cyber Monday sales totaled nearly $8 billion. In 2020, that number increased to $11 billion (Financesonline). 

Online businesses have, unsurprisingly, seen a marked increase in revenue generated over the past few years. In 2020, Shopify saw a 76% increase in revenue during Cyber week, up from 2019. (Shopify).

All this means scammers have a greater incentive to target customers and businesses alike during Cyber Monday.

In this post, we’ll look at what Cyber Monday scams are, the most common Cyber Mondays scams that affect businesses, and how you can protect your business, staff, and customers.

What Is a Cyber Monday Scam?

Cyber Monday scams are usually targeted at unsuspecting victims during the Cyber Monday discount season. Fraudsters take advantage of people’s tendency to shop, spend more money, and look out for unbelievable deals.

There are several Cyber Monday scams out there, and they target everything from users’ money to credit card information, personal details, and even passwords.

Cyber Monday scams are also damaging to businesses because they can ruin your reputation, with phishing scams being the worst of them. These scams can reduce user trust and even cost you legal fees and actual business revenue.

Let’s dive into the most popular Cyber Monday scams and how you can protect yourself.

Top Eight Cyber Monday Scams

Payment Fraud

In a payment fraud, scammers will make multiple purchases on your website using stolen credit card information. These are purchases that may have been flagged in the rest of the year, but with the rush of Cyber Monday, they will blend in with other legitimate transactions.

Once a transaction has been flagged as fraudulent your business might find that transactions have been reversed AFTER the items have been dispatched. Meaning you can end up out of pocket twice.

Payment fraud, also known as carding, is most damaging to businesses because it can lead to a host of complications including chargebacks and the suspension of your merchant payment account.

Fraudulent Online Stores

Customers will expect Cyber Monday deals from virtually every store where they shop, and even some where they don’t. Therein lies the problem because fraudsters use it as an opportunity to scam unsuspecting shoppers.

Scammers will create a fake store, offer mouthwatering discounts and trick users into buying from them. When users submit their credit card information, the fraudsters have what they want. They may sell the information on the blck market or try to max out the card.

Phishing Scams

Phishing scams are very similar to fraudulent stores with one key difference – scammers try to mirror a popular, legitimate website. That may be Amazon, or it may be your online store. This is a practice known as website spoofing, and is more common than you might think.

Users visit the store, assume it’s the one they know and trust, and submit their credit card information only to lose all their money. 

Phishing scams can hurt your business, especially if users never realize that they’ve been scammed. They go their day expecting the Cyber Monday goods from your store, but the goods will never arrive. That could erode trust, loyalty, and may even drag your brand into a social media disaster.

Fake Delivery Scams

Most people will be accepting packages around Cyber Monday so fraudsters will send a fake delivery notification, asking users to click the link to accept their delivery or track their order.

Sometimes, users will be prompted to provide some personal information, which will be stolen, and other times, just clicking the link provides the access that fraudsters need.

False delivery scams are some of the oldest and most effective scams on the internet. The premise is to get the victim to click on a link that secretly steals their information; the packaging is only slightly different.

Gift Card Scams

Gift card scams are quite popular and Cyber Monday gives them a new face. Here, fake online stores will ask victims to pay for their order.

Of course the payment is non refundable and not traceable so immediately the victims submit the gift cards, their money’s gone.

Most people are wise to gift card scams by now but by adding a cyber Monday twist to it, scammers are able to get away with more.

Malware Email Scams

With this scam, fraudsters send victims an email and attached zip file with “important information” regarding their fake order.

E-commerce stores never send zip files to their customers but the victims don’t know that. When they open the zip, malware is immediately installed on their PC. 

It could be ransomware that demands a payment, a script that uses the computer to generate fake traffic or a bot that scrubs the computer of personal information.

Fake Social Media Discounts 

Scammers use fake social medial discounts to lend social proof to their schemes. They will create fake social media accounts and promote discounts to real users online. The recipients don’t suspect a thingbecause they assume the offers are shared by real, honest users.

The rest of the scam plays out the same, and it might include a phishing website, a gift card scam or the user may end up downloading malware.

SMS Phishing

With a phishing SMS, fraudsters will send an SMS with details of your failed order and a customer care number to call. Users who call the number are asked to provide sensitive information.

SMS phishing scams are effective because most people expect phishing links from their email inbox, but not text messages. As a result, they might think it’s authentic.

Three Steps to Protect Your Business from Cyber Monday Scams

Beef up Your Cyber Security

Improving your cyber security protocols will make it much harder for scammers to pull a chargeback payment scam on your business. Taking these precautions around Cyber Monday and other high-traffic dates like Black Friday and Christmas can be invaluable for your business.

Educate Users

Statistics show that 1 in 2 people will be approached by a scammer, and out of those people, 53% of them will engage, and ultimately, 25% will end up losing money (Better Business Bureau).

As a result, warning your users not to engage with suspicious online activity, especially around Cyber Monday, is a great start. Consider including information about the most common types of scams and how to avoid them.

Block all Bot Traffic

Scammers use bots for everything from gathering information for phishing websites to spoofing your official emails.

Use ClickCease’s Bot Zapping to block malicious bot activity on your website including card fraud, account takeover and spamming and spoofing. It doesn’t just protect your business and your website, but also protects your customer’s data and your brand reputation.

You can try Bot Zapping by ClickCease for free for 7 days with our free trial.

Sign up for your free traffic audit and find out why our customers love us.

The post The Cyber Monday Scams Business Owners Need To Watch For appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Unfortunately, this also means that e-commerce fraud will be on the up. Legitimate customers already lost $5.8 billion to online fraud in 2021 (CNBC), and that number is only going to rise. The good news is that even though the prevalence of fraud is growing, your business can sidestep the danger.

In this post, we’ll explore the various ways that eCommerce fraud can affect your business, go over the different types of frauds out there, and show you how you can protect your business.

What is eCommerce fraud?

Ecommerce fraud is a type of online payment fraud in which fraudsters target eCommerce stores or their customers and steal their money.

Ecommerce fraud can affect your business in a variety of ways, from losing direct revenue to losing customer data. A type of fraud can also have you absorbing the negative impact of chargebacks from stolen credit cards.

The bad news is that as eCommerce grows, it will become a bigger target for fraudsters, and at the same time, their tactics will grow in sophistication. All of this puts your online store in a precarious position unless you’re able to understand the risks and adequately mitigate them.

Let’s start with the common types of eCommerce fraud.

Five types of eCommerce fraud that affect businesses

1. Card testing fraud

With card testing eCommerce fraud, the fraudster is trying to see which stolen credit card can be used to make the most purchases. They start by obtaining multiple stolen credit card numbers either by stealing them or buying from an online black market.

Next, they visit your eCommerce store and start making small purchases to see which cards are valid. Once they find the working cards, they slowly move on to larger fraudulent transactions to see what they can get away with.

The problem with card testing fraud, or carding, is that your online store won’t realize it until it’s too late. By the time these purchases are flagged as suspicious, the fraudsters have made several large purchases through your platform.

Carding is often conducted by bots who can process hundreds of transactions per minute, so spotting and blocking these carding bots can make a huge difference to fraud on your site.

2. Chargeback credit card fraud

Chargeback fraud, also called friendly fraud, involves multiple chargebacks that can wreck your store’s financial standing, revenue, and even reputation.

Fraudsters take advantage of company policies by initiating a chargeback after making a purchase, knowing fully well that they’ll get the items, basically for free. The problem is that too many chargebacks in your online store cost you chargeback fees, penalty costs, banking fines, and of course, the cost of the actual goods.

It’s interesting that chargebacks can result from legitimate customers if they are unsatisfied with the purchase. However, too many of these and you can be certain it’s a case of chargeback fraud.

3. Interception fraud

Many eCommerce companies are smart enough to install safety measures that prevent fraudulent transactions, like checking shipping and billing addresses before confirming the purchase. But, fraudsters have found a way around this by providing legitimate addresses but then intercepting the package before it arrives.

This way, they use the victim’s address and information, but they get to keep the package. Fraudsters may intercept the package by stealing it from the victim’s house or contacting your company and changing the shipping address before delivery.

4. Account takeover fraud

These types of online fraud involve scammers hacking your customer accounts, changing their delivery addresses, and buying as many goods as they can.

Fraudsters may gain access to your customer accounts in several ways, including buying stolen passwords and usernames, deploying phishing sites, and even guessing the passwords.

The biggest problem with account takeover fraud is that customers may never trust your site again once they experience this. Even if you’re able to repair the damage, they’ll constantly wonder how fraudsters were able to gain access to their accounts on your website.

5. Refund fraud

Refund frauds are some of the most damaging types of e-commerce fraud because they place your business between two impossible situations. Here’s how these work: a fraudster uses stolen credit card information to make a purchase from your website. They then contact your customer care to request a reimbursement.

However, they want the money sent to a different destination/card/account because their credit card was “stolen.” In the end, your online store refunds the money to the fraudster but is still responsible to the original card owner of the stolen credit card.

Top fraud detection and prevention strategies

The best way to get your online store out of an eCommerce fraud scheme is to stay out in the first place. Here are some best eCommerce fraud detection and prevention strategies you need to implement right now.

1. Ramp up your address verification

Fraudsters using a stolen credit card rarely submit the card’s registered address on checkout, and this is a fantastic opportunity to nip eCommerce fraud in the bud. Start by using an Address Verification Service. 

An Address Verification Service can help your eCommerce store identify fraudulent transactions by double-checking to make sure the submitted address matches the billing address tied to the bank. If the addresses don’t match, the system declines the transactions and flags them as potential online payment fraud. This way, your online store sidesteps fraudulent credit card transactions.

Another strategy for address verification is to avoid accepting non-physical shipping addresses. These may be PO boxes, freight forwarders, or other locations. Customers of eCommerce stores have no problems providing an actual address unless they have something to hide. That’s one reason why you should flag these transactions.

2. Monitor your visitor IPs

Keeping known fraudster IP addresses from accessing your website is another effective eCommerce fraud prevention strategy. If you use any kind of fraud prevention, these will have a constantly updated list of known fraudulent IPs that you can blacklist from your site.

You may also start to notice specific IP addresses that test credit cards on your site. These will be tied to accounts that try multiple stolen credit cards before starting to make incremental purchases. Flagging these in your online store is a critical eCommerce fraud prevention strategy.

Finally, a final layer of protection with IP addresses would be to check that IP addresses match the card’s address. The principle is simple – if it’s a stolen credit card, the fraudster is probably accessing your website from a different location. 

As a result, you can safely flag them as suspicious credit card transactions or at least request more verification, like the ones in the next points.

3. Ensure your store is PCI compliant

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, and the PCI standards are managed by the PCI Security Standards Council. These ensure that all credit card transactions are secure, and complying with standards is not only good for fraud prevention in your eCommerce store, it’s mandatory.

These measures include everything from basic fraud protection to important steps like creating a firewall between your connection and the servers that store your credit card information.

The good news is that if your business is built on an eCommerce store service, they probably provide PCI compliance by default. But if you have an independent setup, it’s critical to ensure that your business is compliant and add this extra layer to your eCommerce fraud prevention system.

4. Create customer protection strategies

Your customers are the primary target of fraud schemes, so it’s important to protect their interests. Reduce your fraud risk by setting limits on purchases on your website. While it may not be the most lucrative decision, it can protect your customer accounts.

Use your order and purchase trends to set limits on the total dollar value any single account can make in a day. Flag all orders above this value and investigate them.

You can also avoid collecting sensitive customer data. This limits your customers’ exposure in the event of a hack or data breach. You may have to collect billing address and credit card information for a smoother shopping experience, but it’s a good idea to avoid collecting social security numbers, birth dates, and other unnecessary data.

5. Ensure customers submit CCV numbers for all purchases

This one measure can cut all credit card fraud instances on your site by 50% or more. Requesting for the  Card Verification Value (CCV) is a failsafe that ensures customers have the physical card in their possession. 

Credit cards that have been stolen and sold will not carry this information, which is why fraudsters often target online merchants that don’t request CCV. Take your store out of the mix by asking customers to provide it on every purchase that accepts credit card payments.

Protect your site from other fraudulent activity

Ecommerce fraud is only one type of fraud affecting online retailers, and it accounts for a very small part of the billions lost to fraud every year. In fact the most common form of online fraud affecting ecommerce businesses and any online marketer is advertising click fraud.

The same bots and fraudsters who perform ecommerce fraud such as carding and spam attacks are also after your ad revenue. And they do this by fraudulently hosting your paid ads, or intentionally clicking your paid search results to waste your ad budget.

Yes, click fraud is a real thing and costs digital marketers more than $40 billion every year.

Find out more in our complete guide to click fraud

ClickCease offers one of the best ecommerce fraud prevention packages for businesses operating online stores and anyone running paid ads. 

Bot Zapping from ClickCease is designed to stop fraudulent bot activity from spam bots, carding or credit card fraud and account takeovers. 

Additionally, ClickCease also offers the industry leading click fraud protection tool on the market. 

Sign up for your FREE trial of ClickCease to try both of these tools out.

The post What Every Ecommerce Marketer Needs To Know About Fraud Detection appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

DDoS attacks have recently become quite affordable to launch – costing around 50 dollars a day to launch — according to Kaspersky lab. Kaspersky also declares that half of all DDoS attacks against companies were used as smokescreens to cover up other kinds of cyber attacks. And with one in three organizations now being hit, it’s imperative to create an anti-DDoS attack measure.

But to create effective measures against DDoS attacks, we must first understand them and examine the damage they do. 

What is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS attack stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack, and it’s a cyber attack strategy where hackers submit multiple access requests on a server to overwhelm the resources and prevent legitimate users from accessing the websites and services connected.

The word “distributed” means that attackers use bot traffic from many sources spread over multiple IP addresses to access the servers. Modern website protection tools are smart enough to detect multiple traffic from the same connected device/internet connection, making a distributed attack necessary for the hack’s success.

Besides targeting large services, DDoS attacks can also be aimed at individual business servers. Here, the hackers may want to shut down a competitor to steal traffic, install ransomware, or simply to protest the organization’s existence.

In 2013, hacktivists, on behalf of the Syrian Electronic Army, launched a DDoS strike against the U.S.’s executive branch, targeting government and privately held organization websites to shut down their service.

A recent example of a business-aimed DDoS attack occurred in 2021 when Microsoft shut down a DDoS attack aimed at one of its Azure customers. The attack was thought to be the largest DDoS attack ever recorded and, thankfully, was unsuccessful.

How do DDoS Attacks Work?

DDoS attacks can be mounted on any scale, depending on the size of the target server. Hackers need to submit enough connection requests to overwhelm the servers and keep legitimate users out. They can do this in one of two ways:

A Denial of Service Attack

A DoS attack is a simpler DDoS attack involving a single internet connection used to bombard the target with fake traffic and requests. These are now ineffective for the most part due to improvements in cybersecurity.

Botnets

The majority of DDoS attacks are implemented by bots. Attackers begin by hacking into regular user computers and installing scripts or malware known as bots. These bots then combine to form a collective network called a botnet with thousands or millions of IP addresses, all available to do the hacker’s bidding.

What are the Types of DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service is a broad category that involves several types of attacks. Cybercriminals will often use one of several approaches to attack their targets, and these approaches can be divided into three broad categories.

Volumetric attacks

Volumetric attacks use massive attack traffic to overwhelm your website’s resources, saturating bandwidth and slowing down all your processes. The malicious traffic will keep legitimate traffic from accessing your site. Volumetric DDoS attacks work because the target is not prepared for such an excessive amount of traffic

Protocol attacks

Protocol attacks also use malicious traffic and consume your networks’ processing capacity. Web servers, firewalls, and layer 3 and layer 4 protocol communications are saturated with excessive requests. 

Application attacks

These aren’t your typical DDoS attack. Application layer attacks exploit vulnerabilities in your application layers by opening connections and creating transaction requests that gradually eat up limited resources like disk space.

How Long Do DDoS Attacks Last?

DDoS attacks can last anywhere from a minute to several hours and can also vary in degree of severity. However, the average DDoS attack will last for about four hours (Securist), and the duration depends on the hacker’s goal or the swiftness of the target’s response.

Is a DDoS Attack Serious?

A DDoS attack is quite serious and is possibly one of the most costly cyber attacks a business can encounter. Here are just some of the ways that a DDoS attack can affect both large and small businesses

Lost Customers and Revenue

During a DDoS attack, there are increasingly fewer resources for your actual costumes. That means a large chunk of your real traffic will not be able to access your site, and eventually, turn to a competitor.

Wcatech estimates that small businesses lose between $8,000 and $74,000 for every hour of down time. Even a few minutes can prove to have devastating consequences on your bottom line. There are also IT recovery costs and preventive measures to protect against further attacks.

Stolen Data Costs

DDoS attacks are often used as a distraction while hackers execute their primary intention. The real target could be data – user passwords and sensitive financial information — or the corruption of the business’ database. The cost of data breaches can be significant because it also impacts the business’ reputation.

Legal Costs

Zappos.com vs. Stevens shows that businesses can be sued for losing user data in a data breach. Zappos, an eCommerce store, suffered a data breach during which several user data was stolen, including Thersa Stevens’. Even though the petition was denied, it at least shows that businesses could face legal consequences if they fail to create DDoS mitigation strategies.

How to Prevent a DDoS Attack

It is impossible to completely prevent a DDoS attack because of the challenge of differentiating bots from legitimate user traffic. However, you can implement countermeasures that make it harder for hackers to successfully execute a DDoS attack, and create plans to mitigate the attack once it commences.

Here are some successful strategies for dealing with DDoS attacks.

Have a Solid Response Plan

According to Statistica, the gaming, internet and telecom, and financial services industries are the top three industries targeted by DDOs attacks. If your business falls in these categories, preparing a response strategy is critical so you can respond as soon as the attack commences.

That means creating:

• A step-by-step plan on how to respond
• Contingencies to keep business operations going
• A list of key stakeholders to inform
• A list of critical systems to protect first

Look out for the Signs

During a DDoS attack, specific signs become apparent, and spotting these signs will tip the scales in your favor. Some of the signs to look for include:

• Slow performance
• Unusually high traffic to a specific endpoint
• Frequent server crashes
• Increased activity from users with a similar characteristic (location, browser version)

Create Server Redundancies

One effective strategy is to rely on multiple servers to deliver your service. When an attack is mounted on one server, your business can quickly switch to another while your security response team deals with the threat; hackers will find it tough to attack all your servers at the same time.

Depending on your business size and industry, this measure could be completely unnecessary, overly expensive, or indispensable. If you operate in a high-target sector like gaming or financial services and have several direct competitors, server redundancy should be a part of your DDoS prevention strategy.

On-board a DDoS Protection Service

DDoS protection services specialize in offering end-to-end defense for businesses. They combine many of these strategies and more to maximize your business’s uptime, accurately scan your traffic for hacker activity, and provide quick mitigation. 

Many businesses prefer to outsource their DDoS prevention to services like these and let them handle the details.

Zap Those Bots

DDoS attacks are launched using bots that operate as part of a larger network, known as a botnet. So setting up a system to identify and keep bots off your website is a great preventive measure. 

This strategy is doubly effective because bots are also used to create fraudulent checkouts, imitate traffic, and leave spammy blog comments.

Bot Zapping from ClickCease is an effective way to prevent bad bots used in DDoS attacks from visiting your WordPress based website. By redirecting bots to a 403 (not found) page, bad bots can’t overload your site or cause any damage.

Wrapping up

According to Cloudflare, DDoS attacks increased by 30% between 2020 and 2021. Now more than ever, your business needs a solid plan to prevent these attacks and mitigate them immediately after they launch. If your business relies on it’s online presence for business then investing in DDoS protection is an essential add-on.

ClickCease’s Bot Zapping offers an extra layer of protection to prevent many forms of malicious bot traffic*. And because it protects your checkout and blocks spam traffic as well, your business can expect great ROI on investment.

If you’re a ClickCease user you can sign up for Bot Zapping as part of your protection. Or, if you prefer, use Bot Zapping from ClickCease as a standalone service.

Try Bot Zapping today for free with our 7 day ClickCease trial.

ClickCease and Bot Zapping are not designed as tools to prevent distributed denial of service attacks. However our software can be used to prevent many forms of malicious bot activity, including some of those seen in DDoS attacks.

The post What Is a DDoS Attack How Can You Avoid It? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

But why is there such a demand for this form of fake traffic? What is a bot farm, and what is it used for?

And perhaps more importantly, how do bot farms affect you as a business owner, and what can you do about it?

What is a bot farm?

Bots are a system of scripts or software designed to click automatically. They are programmed to generate IP addresses and web sessions and interact with various online features. A bot farm is a collective of these bots, which may or may not be in the same physical location.

Often, a bot farm will consist of a large bank of smartphones or tablets connected by a controlling device. They will then carry out repetitive tasks, usually engaging with social media, viewing videos, or simply visiting websites to boost traffic.

These farms are built to serve people and organizations looking to buy bot traffic and fake clicks.

We did a full investigation into click farms right here.

Over the years, bot farms have become more advanced so that they are not just simple scripts. Instead, they’ve evolved in intelligence, scale, and cunning and now have dedicated infrastructure with servers, multiple computers, and routers.

The result? They are more effective at generating fake clicks and harder to differentiate from real human users.

The increased sophistication and number of bot farms are partly because more people want to buy bot clicks to boost their online traffic. As demand grows, the number of bot farms and fake clicks will also rise.

What’s the difference between bot farms and click farms?

Bot farms are essentially a form of click farms. The classic image of a click farm is of a large room full of people carrying out repetitive tasks on computers. However, these days a click farm might actually be a bot farm or could even be remote workers using paid-to-click (PTC) sites.

These workers are often paid based on how many clicks they perform, which is, as you might have guessed, usually very low paid. Bots can, of course, conduct many more clicks, but humans will be able to bypass security such as captchas or bot filters.

There isn’t much difference between click and bot farms in the actual work done. They both generate fake clicks for many reasons, including click fraud and ad fraud.

Why are bot farms a thing?

Both farms exist solely for profit. Every time bots execute Google Ads fake clicks, someone profits. The same goes for social media clicks and follows and streaming views.

Here are a few ways that people use bot farms. 

Social media follows, likes, and comments.

This is a huge market as people spend six to seven figures annually to buy bot clicks on social media. Bots like and follow accounts to lend more credibility and make specific accounts more popular.  One bot farmer estimates that there are up to 45 billion bot accounts on Instagram alone.

Twitch/YouTube streams

Streamers’ profits are directly related to the number of views they get. Naturally, they buy traffic bots to increase their views and draw in more advertisers. These are known as view bots.

PPC clicks

Clicking on PPC ads will drive up a marketer’s ad spend, making the ad platform more money. Fraudulent clicks on some PPC campaigns go as high as 60%.

Website Traffic

Webmasters might buy traffic bots to increase their site’s visitors and get paid more for advertising. They may also monetize these fake clicks in other ways by charging for “quality backlinks,” for example.

Bot farm crackdown

As people continue to buy bot clicks, anti-bot measures have also increased. Social media platforms are cracking down on bot accounts, and advanced solutions are now available to protect your PPC ads. 

Here are three noteworthy examples of the “war” against bot farms.

Fake Instagram purges

Instagram is constantly cracking down on fake followers and bot accounts. Over the years, there have been several purges during which the algorithm uses machine learning to identify and remove fake followers. The platform’s bot detection strategies are more sophisticated than ever, and now, these fake accounts‘ engagements and likes are also getting deleted.

However, that’s not to say that Instagram doesn’t still have a big problem with bot traffic. In fact, it’s still estimated that 10% of Instagram accounts are automated (i.e., bots).

Ukraine bot farm bust

In March 2022, the Ukrainian government destroyed five bot farms being used to spread misinformation and inspire panic among the citizens during the Russian invasion. During the raid, at least 100,000 online accounts, 100 GSM gateway devices, and close to 10,000 sim cards were discovered. 

The bust gives some insight into how extensive the network of bot farms can be. They can run multiple accounts at any time, generating mind-boggling traffic.

Thai click farm

You’ve probably seen footage of the click farm bust in Thailand from 2017. Three Chinese nationals were arrested by Thai police, but not for actually operating the click farm, but for using unregistered SIM cards and illegally imported devices.

However, this became one of the most well-known images of the click farm and remained a common model for bot farm operators around the world.

What do bot farms mean for you

Hard-to-interpret analytics data

Marketers rely on data to make informed decisions and improve performance. But when half of your traffic is made of bots, it becomes tough to make sense of your reports and harder to improve your strategies.

Strain on your site resources

An increase in traffic means that your website now has to handle more requests at any given time, which is doubly damaging since the increased traffic won’t lead to increased revenue. Attackers use this same strategy during a layer 7 DDoS attack when they try to overwhelm your site resource. 

Increase your PPC campaign budget

Google Ads fake clicks means that your “visitors” will never make it to the sale. And with you paying for every click, your ad spend will rise while conversions remain stagnant. Is there anything more frustrating for a digital marketer?

Bad ad platform choices

People who buy traffic bots for their websites and platforms make it challenging for marketers to pick the best places to advertise. You never know if the traffic is from real users interested in your product or bots that will dump your cart and bounce.

What does bot activity look like?

If you advertised on a bot-infested website or have been exposed to fake Google Ads clicks, how can you know for sure? Here are four simple ways to tell.

Abandoned shopping carts

Users abandon their carts often; that’s why retargeting is crucial. But when you observe an unusually high bounce rate, something fishy may be happening.

High clicks, low conversions

Upticks in clicks could mean that your campaign is working. But if it’s followed by the same conversion numbers (or lower), bots might be involved.

New and unfamiliar sources of traffic

Is a large chunk of your traffic originating from a new area outside your target audience? If so, you should probably dig deeper (or do some bot blocking).

Spam

Another common sign of bot traffic is high volumes of spam comments or fake signups. Spam bots are one of the many ways that bot farms are monetised – but they can be more than just an annoyance. Spambots can carry out serious attacks such as DDoS and SEO spam attacks.

How can you protect yourself from bot farms?

Although many ad networks, such as Google and Facebook, are always trying to combat bot traffic, their methods are not always the most effective.

This is because the ad giants want more traffic, which translates to more ad revenue. Their filters do block obvious fraud sources, but with fraudsters constantly innovating their fake click software, Google and co are usually playing catch up.

Read more about what is bot traffic and how to spot bot traffic in Google Analytics

When it comes to organic and direct bots, you’re on your own – which is why bot zapping is even more important.

Click fraud prevention tools like ClickCease have become an essential add-on to modern digital marketers. By using fraud-blocking filters that the ad platforms don’t (or refuse) to use, you can proactively stop bots and other forms of fake traffic on ads.

Whether this is on Google Ads or the display network, Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, ClickCease is the most effective tool to block bot farms and bot traffic.

And now you can also block bot traffic on your WordPress sites with Bot Zapping from ClickCease too!

Get a traffic audit and block bot farms with a FREE trial of ClickCease.

The post Bot Farms: What Are They & What Are They For? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Carding is an increasingly problematic issue for online retailers, with around $30 billion lost to credit card fraud in 2020. In fact, card-not-present fraud is now the most common type of credit card fraud, being around 81% more likely.

And with more businesses reliant on their online platforms, criminals can often find a way to exploit shoddy security to validate their gains.

But what exactly is carding, and how does it work?

What is carding?

Carding is a practice where stolen credit card or gift card details are used on retail websites or payment portals. The intention is for fraudsters to work out which stolen cards actually work, usually by processing multiple card transactions in a short amount of time.

This can result in fraudulent purchases, skewed analytics, false leads, and inventory problems. They can also result in chargebacks, which can have an impact on a company’s reputation with a card issuer.

The practice is also known as credit card stuffing, a card verification attack, and carding bot attacks. 

Carding bots are automated scripts that carry out the task of inputting the card details to validate them for their owners. These stolen or fraudulently obtained cards can then be sold online for as little as $45.

If you manage a website with any form of checkout functionality, you are unfortunately at risk of a carding bot attack.

How are these stolen cards obtained?

The cards used in a carding attack can be both physical cards or from stolen data. Hackers who access poorly stored data can often collect thousand or even millions of credit card details in one attack.

Of course, not all of these cards are valid, so this is where carding is useful. By using bots for carding, fraudsters can quickly understand which stolen cards are worth selling or using.

There are many forums online, usually on the Tor network, where criminals can sell and exchange stolen card details.  

How does a carding attack work?

Like any form of fraud attack using malicious bots, carding can be done quickly and in bulk.  

To start with, the transaction will seem like normal human behaviour, which it often is. An account may be registered if required, and a few items added to a shopping basket. By mimicking genuine user behaviour, the bot can perform the duty that it is programmed to do.

At the point of checkout, the bot will take over. 

This is where multiple credit cards or debit cards are processed to build a list of functioning cards. 

The bot usually carries out a low-value transaction, typically just a few dollars. Once this low-value transaction is confirmed, the card can then be used for more high-value or high-risk purchases. 

How to spot a carding attack

Like most bot activity, there are often several signals that suggest something is amiss.

By keeping an eye out for these signs, you can tell if your site might have been a victim of a carding attack:

• A high volume of failed payment authorizations
• Smaller average basket size
• A spike in the number of abandoned shopping carts
• The same user IP causing a large number of failed payment authorizations
• Multiple visits to the same checkout page in relation to site visits
• Cards with different addresses being used, or cards rejected due to address mismatch

Although the carding bot might exhibit what seems like genuine user behaviour, to a point, it’s at the checkout where the truth comes out.

These bots might also be cyborgs. This means they are operated by a human user until the checkout step when the fraudster just runs the bot code.  

Of course, this is where it’s too late for many bot prevention platforms. The damage is done, and you’re left with fraudulent orders, countless chargebacks, or an analytics dashboard that is a mess.

So what can you do?

Preventing carding bot attacks

There are a number of ways a site owner can prevent this kind of bot attack.  

Captchas

One of the original ways of preventing bots from clicking on your website, Captcha, is still effective. However, it can be off-putting for genuine customers who are used to one-click checkout.  

Use AVS

The Address Verification System (AVS) helps to match the card user’s address with the account or delivery address. Because carding bots will often be trying to verify multiple cards from different people, it’s very likely that the addresses won’t match.

Behaviour analysis

Using an external fraud solution that analyses genuine user behaviour is a good way to block carding bots. This form of fraud prevention uses machine learning to spot signs of bot behaviour and block activity in real-time.

Browser validation

Many bots operate from within their own window. This means that they may need to pretend they are using a specific browser, such as Chrome, to be able to access your site. Browser validation software can check to see if the user is really using the browser they say they are and eliminate these types of fraud bots.

API security

Most sites with integrated payment often have API certificates to validate payment information. This is vulnerable to brute force attacks from carding bots, so e-commerce sites use Transport Layer Security (TLS) and other authorization mechanisms to check transactions.  

Velocity checks

This simple fraud-checking solution helps block someone from trying to use multiple cards in a short time frame. A genuine user (e.g., a human) is unlikely to make more than a handful of transactions on any platform. You can specify the threshold for this type of transaction with your payment processor, which is one of the easiest ways to prevent carding fraud on your site.

Preventing bot clicks

However you’re managing your business online, bots can be disruptive and damaging. From clicking on your ads, or spamming to fraudulently inflating your analytics, blocking bots has become increasingly important to businesses.

Sign up for ClickCease for free to prevent bot clicks on your Google and Facebook Ads.

The post Are Carding Bots Using Your eCommerce Site To Commit Fraud? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Your search results on Google would be more like Alta-Vista or AOL if it wasn’t for bots (if you’re old enough to get those references, you’ll remember that search results pre-Google were pretty rubbish).

In fact, all of those automated website traffic bots are designed to make our lives much easier. And for the most part, they do.

What are bots?

An internet bot is a piece of code that performs a task or a number of tasks. Often hosted on a computer server or data center, bots are often tasked with performing repetitive tasks or collecting huge amounts of data relatively quickly.

Although the image of a robot or crazy scuttling robo-beetle running around the internet is quite cool, the truth is it’s just an algorithm.

The program runs, searches the internet, and delivers the required result. Usually, in a fraction of a second.

Anyone can create an internet traffic bot – in fact, it’s the ease of making them that causes some problems. Even relatively inexperienced web coders and program a simple bot with a little bit of study.

Although AI and machine learning are accelerating rapidly, at the moment, these bots are not sentient. They simply do what they are programmed to do.

Heavy lifting bots

With the ability to perform repetitive tasks quickly, traffic bots can be used for both good and bad.

“Good” bots can, for example, check websites to ensure that all links work, collect useful data such as search rankings, or analyze site performance.

“Bad” bots on the other hand can be unleashed to infiltrate websites to steal data, spread viruses, or overload servers with denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

For most end users, like browsers of websites, bot traffic isn’t really an issue.

But for site owners bot traffic is critical; whether it’s to ensure that Google is crawling your site properly, to enhance the accuracy of your analytics results, to ensure the health and performance of your website, or to prevent malicious behavior on your website and ads.

The fact is that more than half of all web traffic is bot traffic. What’s disturbing, however, is that 28.9% of all traffic is thought to be from malicious sources. To understand how this kind of website bot traffic can be damaging, we’ll need to take a closer look at the internet traffic out there…

Different types of bot traffic

As we’ve mentioned, there are good and bad types of website bot traffic. One thing to remember is that internet traffic bots are a very diverse bunch.

On one hand, we have complex scripts developed by companies to collect a wide array of data. On the other, we have simple programs that perform one or two simple tasks. And we also have those annoying and malicious programs like spam bots or form-filling bots.

“Good Bots”

• SEO: Search engine crawler bots crawl, catalog, and index web pages, and the results are used by search providers like Google to provide their service
• Website Monitoring: These bots monitor websites and website health for issues like loading times, downtimes, and so on
• Aggregation: These bots gather information from various websites or parts of a website, and collate them into one place
• Scraping: Within this category, there are both “good” and “bad” bots. These bots “scrape” or “lift” information from websites, for example, phone numbers and email addresses. Scraping (when legal of course) can be used for research for example, but can also be used to illegally copy information or for spamming

“Bad Bots”

• Spam: Spam bots are used for spreading content, often within the “comments” section of websites or to send you those phishing emails from Nigerian Princes
• DDoS: Complex bots can be used to take down your site with a denial of service attack – often a coordinated attack
• Ad Fraud: Bots can be used to click on your ads automatically, often used together with fraudulent websites to boost the payout for ad clicks – there is a rich history of ad clicker bots out there
• Ransomware and other malicious attacks: Bots can be used to unleash all kinds of havoc, including ransomware attacks which are used to encrypt devices – often in exchange for a payout to ‘unlock’ them

Read more about the different types of cyber crime here.

How to detect bot traffic?

Detecting bot traffic is the first step in ensuring that you’re getting all the benefits of the good bots (like appearing in Google’s search results) while preventing the bad bots from affecting your business.

When figuring out how to detect bot traffic, the best place to start is with Google Analytics.

If you have wondered to yourself, “Can I see bot traffic in my Google Analytics account?”, the answer is: Yes. You can definitely get an indication of it.

You need to know what to look out for, and you’ll be able to get an indication of bot traffic, but you may not find a smoking gun.

The key ratios to keep track of here are:

• Bounce Rate
• Page Views
• Page Load Metrics
• Avg Session Duration

The bounce rate is expressed as a percentage and shows visitors of your website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Humans are most likely to arrive on your site (from a search engine result, for example), and then click through to explore your offering. A bot isn’t interested in exploring your site, so it will “hit” one page, and leave. A high bounce rate is a great indicator of bot traffic detected.

Page Views are almost the reverse of this. The average visitor might visit a few pages on your site, and then move on. If you suddenly see traffic where 50 or 60 pages are being viewed, this is most likely not human traffic.

Slow site load metrics. This is also really important to monitor. If load times suddenly slow down, and your site is feeling sluggish, this could indicate a jump in bot traffic, or even a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack using bots. A tech solution might be required in some cases (more about this below), but this is a good first step in how to detect bots.

Avg. Session duration will tell you a lot about how users from different sources are interacting with the site. In the image below, the Microsoft Corp Network is most likely bringing non-human traffic. Two seconds is classic for bot clicks.

How To Stop Bots From Crawling My Site

There are different reasons why some people might want to stop bots from crawling their sites. For some it might be simply guarding gated content; for others, it might be preventing hackers from accessing databases. Luckily protecting sections of your website from internet traffic isn’t too tricky – in theory at least.

Your first stop is your robots.txt file. This is a simple text file that gives guidelines to bots visiting your page in terms of what they can and can’t do. Without a robots.txt file, any bot will be able to visit your page. You can also set up your file so that no bots can visit your page (although see the warning above).

The “middle ground” is to put rules in place, and the good news is that the “good” bots will abide by these. The bad news, however, is that the “bad” bots will disregard these rules entirely.

When it comes to the “bad” bots, you’ll need to engage a tech solution. This is where a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service comes in. One of the advantages of a good CDN is the protection it can provide against malicious bots and DDoS attacks. Some of the most common ones are Cloudflare and Akamai, which can stop some bots from crawling sites. As Cloudflare themselves say, “Cloudflare’s data sources will help reduce the number of bad bots and crawlers hitting your site automatically (not all)”.

There are also purpose-built anti-bot solutions that can be installed, but it’s important to note that most of these can protect your website relatively well, but cannot protect you outside of that – for example, your ads on search engines and other properties.

Another more tedious (and less effective) option is to manually block IPs where you know that the traffic is bot-related. A trick you can use is to check the geographic origin of the traffic. If your traffic is usually from the US and Europe, and suddenly you’re seeing a lot of IPs from the Philippines, it could be a bot or click farm.

Why is it important to protect your ads?

One of the biggest threats to your ad campaigns, and by extension to the future of your business, is bot traffic. CHEQ and the University of Baltimore economics department showed that even opportunistic bots are set to cost businesses $35 billion in 2021. 

Bots can be programmed to click on your ads, leaving chaos in their wake: for example, by draining your Google Ads account, causing Google to rate your ad’s performance as poor, by stopping your ad from being displayed while competitors’ ads are featured prominently, and by impacting conversion rates and rendering your analytics meaningless.

In today’s digital advertising industry, bots are both a huge help and have the potential to be very damaging. Taking a proactive approach to PPC protection is the only way to ensure that your ad campaigns are safe. All ad managers should consult with third party software to determine how their traffic is being affected by bot activity.

Take back control and block traffic bots, improve your website traffic quality, win more real customers, and stop wasting money.

ClickCease is the industry leading click fraud prevention software, highly rated by marketing professionals and business owners. To block fraud on your PPC ads, including bot traffic, sign up for your free trial of ClickCease.

Get Your Ads Protected Now

The post What is bot traffic, and how to stop traffic bots? appeared first on ClickCease Blog.