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.

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.

Spoofing, or copying, is a major source of online fraud. From website spoofing to software spoofing, pulling the digital wool over people’s eyes allows all kinds of sneaky activity to carry on. 

In fact, device spoofing is one of the main methods used in many forms of digital fraud including ad fraud and click fraud. 

So what can you do to avoid device spoofing affecting your online business?

First of all, let’s look at the basics.

What is device spoofing?

Device spoofing is the practice of presenting a digital device as something different, usually for fraudulent purposes, particularly ad fraud. For example, a server in a data center could change its device ID so that it appears to be a mobile device.

Device spoofing can use several processes including user agent spoofing, or UA spoofing. This is the process whereby the device presents a falsified user agent string, which is the unique identifier containing information about the device including:

• Operating system and version
• Processor and video card information
• Location information, often using IP address
• Device type including model

Presenting a false UA string is easily done using various developer tools, which are designed to help developers test software on different devices without changing their own device.

How is device spoofing used for fraud?

Using device spoofing for fraudulent purposes means that fraudsters can get around a number of security protocols. For example, many ad platforms or online services will use device fingerprinting as a way to identify who is using their services or visiting their websites. 

Device fingerprinting uses several methods to identify the website visitor, using a mixture of the user agent string and also other techy processes such as the IP address, device hash, cookie hash and more. 

Find out how device fingerprinting works.

This device fingerprinting can also be used to prevent certain types of device, browser or even specific locations from interacting with the online service. But if a fraudster can get around the device fingerprinting then they can conduct a variety of fraudulent or malicious activities.

This might include:

• Payment card fraud, also known as carding
• Advertising click fraud, also known as ad fraud
• Spam attacks, including the more serious spam SEO injection attack
• Malware injection
• Account takeover

Ad fraud is a growing problem, find out more in our blog

How do fraudsters make money with spoofed devices?

The most common reason for device spoofing is for ad fraud, which is the practice of generating fake traffic on paid ads.

This hugely lucrative industry makes fraudsters more money every year than credit card fraud, with an estimated $41 billion lost in 2021 to ad fraud. And for a very modest cost hackers can pick up readily available fingerprint spoofing software on the dark web.

Because ad fraud and click fraud are relatively simple criminal actions, with little in the way of repercussions, it has become a popular way for criminal networks to make some extra money.

In fact, there are even hobbyists making money with ad fraud by setting up simple click farms. By simply hiring a botnet based in a data center, ad fraudsters can run a basic campaign on a spoofed website and disappear.

And because device spoofing is a key part of this huge growing industry, this is one of the main reasons for its boom. 

How common is device obfuscation in fraud?

Because many fraud attacks use bots and botnets, the common way to hide the traffic source is by using device spoofing. This allows bot traffic to visit a website or app while appearing to be a genuine human user.

Often, these bots will hide behind a VPN or proxy server, which allows them to switch IP addresses and present fake device information.

A VPN presents the easiest and most cost-effective way to dodge many security filters, which is one of the reasons why we pay close attention to VPN traffic here at ClickCease.

To be clear, just because a website visitor is using a VPN it doesn’t mean they are performing fraud. And in fact our filters will look at over 100 data points before blocking a user from clicking paid ads.

So, although not all VPN users are fraudulent, more often than not, fraudulent users are using VPNs.

So, how common are these spoofing or obfuscation methods?

Using fraud blocking on our own domain, we see:

• 41% of ad traffic blocked as fraudulent 

Of this fraudulent traffic around 40% is from fraudulent devices, or likely spoofed devices.

This volume is not consistent across all of our clients. Not all click fraud is ad fraud.

But industries with high value CPC are often targeted by ad fraud networks, which is evident in the volume of fake traffic.

How can I spot or block fake devices on my website?

For business owners or marketers, stopping fraudulent devices from clicking on their ads or interacting with their website is more necessary than ever. With money lost on fake ad clicks climbing by billions of dollars every year, using a click fraud solution like ClickCease is the most effective, and cost effective, way to protect your site.

Although ClickCease is the industry leader in click fraud prevention, it’s now also possible to block direct or organic traffic too. So sneaky fraudsters clicking on shopping carts and processing fake payments can be called out and blocked…

If your business or website does any of these:

• Runs paid ads on Google, Facebook Ads or Bing Ads
• Has a shopping cart/checkout function
• Has a login/create account function
• Relies on it’s web presence for customers 

Then spotting and blocking fake traffic online needs to be part of your strategy.

Not so sure?

Run a FREE traffic audit using ClickCease and get a unique view of your ad traffic and website visitors.

Sign up today for a free 7 day trial, pop the tracking code on your site, and start blocking fake clicks on your ads and your WordPress website.

The post How Device Spoofing became a major cyber threat appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

When it comes to online safety, especially as a website owner, understanding bot protection and bot management has never been more important. 

Are bots clicking your ads, or are bots stealing your content? Perhaps bots are pretending to be your customers and ordering your products using stolen credit cards?

Yup, there is a lot to bear in mind.

Here at ClickCease we spend a lot of time looking at bot traffic and bot behaviour online. So, we’ve put together this guide about bot protection to help you make sense of what is going on.

What are bots?

The term bot is short for robot, and refers to a scripted program used online for a variety of purposes. And because it is a scripted program, a bot can be used to undertake various tasks from simple to complex.

For example, a simple bot can be used to post a standard response in comment forms or on social media profiles. This is a form of a spam bot, which you have probably experienced before.

A more complex form of internet bot is the chat bot. These bots are used to provide customer service support and are integrated into a website by the website owner. Chat bots can then interact with customers using a specific model of preset responses.

But they can also collect extra information from a database to provide specific support, or can also switch to human based customer support if needed. 

However there are also malicious bots, which are unfortunately widespread. These are bots used to perform all manner of fraudulent activities such as stealing data, performing hacking activity such as account takeovers, and stealing your money in a variety of ways.

A brief history of bots

Bots have actually been around since before the age of the internet. In fact, bots and AI have been used since the 1950’s.

Alan Turing, widely seen as the grandfather of AI developed a test based on a game, the Imitation Game. The theory was to have two unseen participants convince a person that they were something that they’re not. In the case of the Turing Test, the two hidden participants were meant to persuade a human that they were also human. Of course, one of the participants is a computer.

The Turing Test remains a benchmark of whether a machine can either think or fool a human.

In 1954 we saw the first software designed to play games. First of all, a team simulated various hundreds of hands of Blackjack to work out how to best play against them. This then set the benchmark for game playing bots which make decisions based on provided data.

In the 1960’s, a bot named ELIZA was developed by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. ELIZA was meant to act like a psychotherapist by offering questions to typed responses, in much the same way as a therapist might ask similar probing questions.

You can still talk to ELIZA today, which makes for a few minutes of amusement.

And if you think that viruses and trojans don’t appear until the internet era, you’re in for a surprise. Creeper, the first self-replicating software program, first appears in 1971. Originally designed as a test to see if software could spread itself, Creeper would spread itself over the ARPANET, an early version of the internet. 

And although Creeper had no malicious intent, it still served as the first example of automated and self-propagating software.

The internet era

Fast forward to the 1980’s and the birth of the modern internet. In 1983, the computers started talking to each other over phone cables, and by the early 90’s the world wide web became accessible to home users.  

Some early internet bots were used to automate responses on chat networks, such as the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). And with early search engines such as AOL and Excite came web crawlers, who collected data from across the fledgling internet to deliver search results in real time.

The 90’s also saw the first spam bots, with the Usenet spam bot often cited as the first example. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, spam bots are still quite popular today.

The rise of fraud bots

It didn’t take long for malicious bots to materialize. 2000 saw the arrival of GTbot, or Global Threat bot, one of the first known instances of a botnet used for cybercrimes such as denial of service attacks.

As Google Adwords made its first appearance in 2000, publishers were quick to realize that they could inflate their ad payout by repeatedly clicking ads on their sites. However it’s not until Clickbot A was uncovered in 2006 that it became obvious that bots and botnets were being used to automate these fraud clicks.

Fast forward to today and it’s estimated that over half of all internet traffic is automated. From web crawlers collecting useful data and information, to malicious botnets carrying out various forms of fraud – today anyone online needs to be aware of the possibility of bot based fraud.

And if you’re running a website, bot protection is a security necessity.

What can bots be used for?

Bots are often used to perform online tasks which might take a human a long time. This can include:

• Crawling the internet to provide search information (Google search results for example)
• Analyzing traffic data for research tools (e.g: Ahrefs, SEMRush, and other data tools)
• Collecting personal information such as email addresses (data scraping)
• Verifying transactions or other data
• Delivering fresh content such as news reports or social media posts
• Interacting with customers and providing customer service via chatbots
• Sending automated responses on social media platforms or websites

But of course, there is plenty of malicious bot activity that can occur too. In fact most cyber crimes and data breaches are performed using bot automation. 

If you manage a website or a business that provides a service online, stores data on the internet or uses digital advertising then you also need to understand the potential threats from bot attacks.

The main bot attack threats

Bot powered attacks on websites can come in various forms, and some might even seem quite innocuous such as spam.

But if a bot can access your website, you can experience any or all of the effects of unwanted bot traffic. This includes:

Database access

Bots can access online databases using credential stuffing. This is where bots are used to attempt to crack accounts using commonly used passwords – which is why you should always use complex and unique passwords.

Once a bot has access to an online database it can collect information about your customers personal information including addresses, payment information and other sensitive details. 

Payment card fraud

With hundreds or thousands of stolen payment details to process, it’s quicker for a bot to try multiple cards on your site than it is for a human to input the details. This results in a barrage of fraudulent transactions, chargebacks and even lost inventory. Of course your site needs to have a checkout function in order for this to work.

Read more about payment fraud here.

Content scraping and website spoofing

Although content scraping might seem like a relatively insignificant action, it can result in bigger problems. For example, by copying a website, aka spoofing, fraudsters can impersonate your business and use your branding for phishing, payment card harvesting, social engineering and other fraudulent activities.

Read more about content scraping here.

Traffic based bot attacks

Bot traffic can be used to overload bandwidth and take websites offline – a practice known as Distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). Bot traffic can also be used to inflate the viewing metrics and engagement on PPC ads, talking of which…

Ad fraud and click fraud

If you pay per click or per impression on your ads, about 1 in 4 of those are not genuine humans. Yup, unwanted bot traffic can click or watch your ads putting you out of pocket in your marketing. Fun fact: ad fraud and click fraud are more lucrative than credit card fraud, making off with over $41 billion in 2021 – and rising…

Find out more in our complete guide to click fraud.

Spreading viruses and malware

Although the most common way of viruses spreading is through clicking downloads or suspicious links, bots can also spread malware by embedding code into websites or apps. Using attacks such as SQL injection means malware elements can be added to your app or website if it isn’t properly protected.

Find out more about malware injection bots here.

Fake social media profiles

Bots are often used to generate fake followers and engagement on social media platforms. Although this tends not to be malicious, these bots can have a negative impact on your marketing efforts. Fake ad impressions, or ad fraud, on social media is a big concern for both paid advertising and influencer marketers. 

Spam

Perhaps the most obvious and annoying form of unwanted bot traffic is from spam. Spam bots fill up your comments boxes, enquiries forms and email inbox with a seemingly endless barrage of garbage. And as if simply annoying you wasn’t enough, spam bots can even perform spam injection – a form of black hat SEO where bots add low quality links and content to your site without your knowledge.

Read more about spam injection in our blog.

How can bot attacks be prevented?

Preventing bots from attacking your website requires software designed to catch this malicious traffic. Although many website platforms such as WordPress or Shopify do offer software to catch and prevent bots, increasingly the world of malicious bots is becoming more sophisticated. 

Keeping bad bot traffic off your website needs specialist tools. And this is especially true if you process payments on your website, or have a customer login.

But any website can fall victim to DDoS attacks or even malware injection. And these automated attacks can result in lost business, damage to your reputation and negative publicity, not to mention the cost and hassle to restore the site.

Although there is a lot of choice for bot protection security, ClickCease offers an all-in-one bot mitigation solution.

ClickCease has specialized in click fraud prevention, using advanced machine learning algorithms to spot and block fake traffic on PPC ads.

And with our new Bot Zapping tool, ClickCease now offers a full bot protection solution designed to prevent fraudulent activity from account takeovers to spam injection.

Stop unwanted bots on your website, protect your marketing spend and make sure only the good bots get through. Try ClickCease for FREE for 7 days and see for yourself how much of a difference it makes.

The post The Guide to Bot Protection appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

Imagine that you launch a new lead magnet campaign and invest as much as possible in pushing it – PPC ads, influencer marketing, the works.  

But instead of pulling in high-quality leads that match your investment, your forms are bombarded with fake leads or, worse, the info of real individuals who have no actual interest in your offer. That’s the reality of form bots.

What exactly is a form bot, why is it a problem, and how can you stop them from disrupting your business? Let’s get into all of that.

What is a form bot?

A form bot is a bot program specifically designed to fill out forms on your website. They access sites autonomously and bombard the available forms with spam information for the purpose of accessing restricted/gated content.

Here is how form bots work: they crawl your website, searching the code that indicates a form field. When found, the bots populate the fields with pre-programmed data and submit. These answers may be real, stolen user data, or complete gibberish. Yes, they are technically a form of spam bot.

When you put a free downloadable PDF behind a data collection form, form bots will fill the available fields with fabricated answers so they can access your information.

In other situations, fraudsters may use form bots to create fake leads for you. This is common in situations where they can claim credit for the leads you generate and receive some form of payment. 

Form bots might also be used by a competitor with malicious intent to throw off your lead generation and slow down your business.

What are the dangers of form bots to your business?

Expensive and useless leads

The cost impact of form bots can really stack up as more of them target your website. The leads they bring are worthless, which means every dollar you spend acquiring them is a wasteful expense.  

But your business will also spend resources to chase down those leads. These might be inexpensive measures like an email campaign, but you might employ more sophisticated methods like ad retargeting. Since you can’t retarget a form bot, that is a costly dead end from the get-go. 

Finally, whenever you chase down a form bot lead, you ignore actual hot leads. Over time, those may grow cold and become just as worthless.

Traffic burden

Like every visitor to your website, form bots will engage your server. They will submit connection requests, visit pages, and interact with your content – all activities that can place a greater demand on your site’s resources.

If you get a large influx of form bots at a period of peak traffic, your website may become unresponsive to actual users, which could drive them away.

Competitive disadvantage

For every fake lead your business chases down, your competitors could be chasing down the real leads, putting you at a competitive disadvantage. This may not be a problem if you’re in a slow-moving industry.  

But businesses in highly competitive markets could lose more than just time to the menace of form bots.

How to protect your website against form bots

Use reCAPTCHA

Google reCAPTCHA is your first line of defense against form bots. It’s free and easy to set up, and more importantly, it’s the bane of form bots. Google reCAPTCHA is an intelligent program that analyzes visitor behavior to determine whether they are bots or humans.

If the system thinks they are human, it presents them with a simple check box to click. Otherwise, they’ll have to complete a straightforward puzzle that includes finding and identifying the correct picture.

The beauty of reCAPTCHA is that you don’t need to do much to implement it. Simply add it to your website and let it do the rest.

Use a double opt-in form

Have you ever filled out a form on a website only to receive a confirmation link in your email? If yes, then you’ve seen double opt-in forms in action. These are pretty easy to set up but are highly effective for filtering out form bots.

Every time someone enters an email address in your form, they’ll receive an automatic confirmation link in that inbox, and they have to click it before their submission is recorded. Form bots can’t complete this step because the email is either fake or belongs to someone else.

Add form bot traps

These are also called honey pots and are specifically designed to draw in form bots. Honey pots are fields that are invisible from the user side but are fillable by form bots. Since real users can’t see or interact with these, you know that every submission was made by a form bot and can comfortably disregard it.

Form bot traps like these only have pros – they don’t interfere with your lead generation in any way and can be a clear indication of form bot activity when filled. Anyone on your team with basic programming skills should be able to implement these honey pots.

Use simple spam protection

WordPress webmasters know about blocking spam comments too well. Plugins like Askimet and Titan are very effective, and installing these on your website is a good idea.

They are designed to filter out spam comments, giving you one less thing to worry about with form bots.

Use IP and geolocation measures

Geolocation measures are also quite effective for keeping form bots off your website. For starters, you can block all fraud-associated IP addresses from accessing your website. Most web security solutions will have access to a list like this and can easily integrate them into your website.

If your website has also had a significant influx of form bots, you can monitor their activity, identify areas with the highest risk, and block your forms in those locations. The only downside to this is that you could also prevent potentially high-quality leads from accessing your forms.

Protecting your website with ClickCease

ClickCease’s Bot Zapping is an always-on detection service that monitors your WordPress site, detects bot activity, and actively keeps them from interacting with your website.  

The beauty is that Bot Zapping doesn’t just work for form bots; spam bots, click bots, and even fake traffic bots will get a 403 unauthorized page instead of your actual website.

That means they won’t register in your analytics or throw off your business in any way.  

Try ClickCease for free for 7 days – including Bot Zapping for WordPress.

The post The Problem With Form Bot Spam & How To Stop It 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.

Even though Black Friday scams don’t affect your business directly, they can subtly impact your sales and revenue, ad performance, website traffic, and even rope your company into illegal activity. As a result, you need to understand how they work and, more importantly, how to avoid them.

What are Black Friday Scams?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday scams are structured to look like a part of the safe and secure transactions people complete every year on the Holiday Shopping weekend. But unknown to the victims, they are actually designed to steal their money, financial information, personal details, and even passwords to social media accounts. 

On the surface, it looks like only unsuspecting shoppers are affected by these scams, but businesses are often caught in the crossfire. For example, scammers may use stolen credit card information to buy from your website, or they may spoof your website to steal user data and ruin our reputation in the process.

Seven Types of Black Friday Scams That Can Affect Your Business

There are seven common Black Friday shopping scams, and each of these can do damage to your business in a number of ways. Here is how they work.

1. Fake Websites Scam

The fake website scam is quite straightforward; scammers set up a fake website that looks exactly like Amazon (or spoof your site if you’re an eCommerce store). When unsuspecting visitors make online purchases there, their credit card information and personal details are collected and later sold or used to steal their money.

The key to these scammy Black Friday deals is that the websites have to look as convincing as possible, with pages of content copied from the actual site – a practice known as website spoofing.

2. Gift Card Scams

Scammers often use gift cards to collect untraceable payments from their victims. They could promise the victim a remarkable discount that only works via a special payment coupon, or they could be selling non-existent computer software that will boost the victim’s PC performance.

These types of scams are effective because of how accessible the gift cards are. You can pop into any convenience store to buy them, pass the information to scammers, and watch your money disappear.

3. Charity Fraud Scams

Fake charity scams prey on people’s desire to help others, especially during the holiday season. To execute, scammers pose as charity organizations and set up an elaborate ruse to appear authentic and deceive well-meaning people. 

They use fake websites, set up fictional executive positions, and even launch seemingly authentic social media campaigns. This kind of scam is unique because the fraud victims may never know that they’ve been played since most people don’t bother researching the charity they donate to. 

4. Non-delivery Scams

Non-delivery scams can have a big impact on your business and are another effect of website spoofing. Here, users order a product at a remarkable discount (usually around discount seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday) from what looks like your website.

However, they will not receive a tracking number, and the order will never arrive. This kind of scam can rope your business in because scammers pose as your business to collect payment and orders – right down to the branding and contact details. Again, it comes down to website spoofing…

Of course, you never receive the order, fraudsters get the money and the customer is left empty handed. The result is that you’ll have angry customers yelling at your customer care for orders you know nothing about.

5. Fake Order and Fake Delivery Scams

Fake delivery scams and fake order scams work by using phishing methods such as sending SMS or email messages to many people. They rope victims in by saying there’s a problem with their order, with a link to correct the issue.

The messages here are asking them to confirm their details in order to accept their package – but of course the message isn’t genuine.

These scams can be very effective because the messages are designed to look as authentic as possible. And because many people have orders pending on the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend, people can easily fall victim to this scam.

This scam is a phishing scam which is designed to collect people’s login or payment card details.

6. Payment fraud

Perhaps the most obvious form of fraud on Black Friday or Cyber Monday is the use of stolen payment information. Fraudsters will use details harvested from data breaches or theft to process payment on ecommerce websites. Businesses will ship these items only for the payment to be reverted due to fraud, resulting in chargebacks for the business owner.

Find out more about carding on your shopping site.

Fraudsters can also use methods using bots to hack into your customer database, a practice known as account takeover. They can then process orders using stored payment information, which of course the genuine customer never receives or even knows anything about.

7. Advertising click fraud

Ad fraud and click fraud are a method used by fraudsters to inflate the payout they receive from ads, or to maliciously click paid links. Both of these activities see a surge in activity around Black Friday weekend, with Cheq finding that nearly 36% of web traffic was fraudulent in 2021.

And because marketers are often spending more on their display ads and social media marketing over the Holiday Shopping weekend, this means fraudsters make off with even more ad revenue.

Blocking click fraud over Black Friday is an essential fraud prevention strategy for every business owner running PPC ads.

Find out more in our complete guide to click fraud.

How to Avoid Black Market Scams as a Business Owner

1. Educate Your Employees

Scammers will often try to gain access to critical information about your business, making it easier to scam your customers. They may steal your customer list or passwords or even redirect your traffic to a phishing site.

You can prevent this by educating your employees to create strong passwords and avoid emails from unverified sources.

Your employees should also take precautions like these:

• Report suspicious activity on your website immediately
• Avoid suspicious-looking websites when shopping online
• Avoid buying from unfamiliar stores
• Immediately report all suspected cases of fraud to their credit card company. Thanks to the fair credit billing act, they have a good shot at getting their money back

2. Remind Customers to Protect Their Privacy

The odds are that your customers will be primary targets for Black Friday shopping scams. One of the best things you can do is to remind them to take precautionary measures. 

That could mean listing all your authentic URLs and informing them to double-check the website address before entering their credit card information.

Warning your customers could also mean reminding them that your business does not accept gift cards and reporting any suspicious activity to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Finally, consider cautioning your customers to never submit any personal information that your website wouldn’t normally ask for, like the social security number, date of birth, or other sensitive information.

3. Act on All Fraudulent Transactions as Soon as Possible

Scammers will often use stolen credit cards to make online purchases. These could be everything from expensive Amazon goods to your business’ products and services. Payment merchants like Stripe and PayPal have systems in place that detect suspicious card activity and shut down the transactions.

You’ll usually get a report on these transactions via email or on your dashboard. When you do, act immediately, or else your account could get suspended, shut down, or worse, your company could be implicated in credit card fraud schemes.

When you receive these alerts, take them up with your payment processing merchant. They will have a protocol that may include collecting more information on checkout and taking additional precautions when shipping items. For more information, check out Stripe’s recommended response action plan.

4. Look Out for Suspicious Traffic Activity

Irregular traffic activity will be your biggest indicator of scam activities. You might notice irregularly low traffic during periods when your numbers should be through the roof (like Black Friday). In this case, scammers may be redirecting your visitors to phishing websites designed to look exactly like yours.

The key is to find these sites as quickly as possible and report them to the FTC. You can also submit them to scam-busting websites like Scambusters and Fake Website Buster so that other users can be warned.

You could also notice unusual visits from unrecognized IP addresses. This could mean that you have some new customers, but it could also mean that scammers are researching your site. 

It’s a good idea to create a no-access list for IP addresses that have been associated with online scams in the past. That way, it’s much harder for scammers to involve your business in their schemes. 

Finally, your analytics could indicate increased ad clicks without the corresponding conversions. This usually happens when your ads are being clicked by click bots designed to rack up your ad spend and waste your money. 

Even though your users aren’t at risk in this scenario, you could join the thousands of businesses that will lose up to $65 billion to ad fraud in 2022 (Juniper Research).

The solution here is to work with trusted ad partners, keep a close eye on your traffic, and, again, block flagged IP addresses that have been linked to ad fraud.

6. Prevent bot activity on your site

One of the most effective methods to reduce fraud on your website on Black Friday weekend is to block bad bots on your sit. This means you’re less likely to see common fraud such as:

• Payment fraud (carding)
• Account takeover
• Website spoofing
• Click fraud and ad fraud

Bot protection software such as ClickCease adds a layer of security to reduce the chances of bad bots and fraud from happening to your business.

Rounding up

On Black Friday, it’s more important than ever to protect not just your business but your customers too. By preventing fake traffic on your website you can reduce the impact of website spoofing, credit card fraud and data theft or account breaches.

And, if you’re running paid ads, you can make sure your ad campaigns are much more effective and bring in the best ROAS possible.

By using ClickCease, business owners can use our Bot Zapping tool to reduce the impact of bot traffic on their site.

Sign up for your FREE 7 day trial of ClickCease this Black Friday and stop bad bots from scamming you AND your customers

The post The Black Friday Scams Businesses Need to Know appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

We may be at the end of an era because, according to research, half of all CAPTCHAs passed are completed by bots, not real users. That means the attackers controlling the bots can do everything from leaving spam comments and submitting invalid forms to abusing other services that your website provides.

In light of this, now’s a good time to understand how CAPTCHA works, how a CAPTCHA solver can bypass it so easily, and what it means for your website.

What exactly is CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHA is a descriptive acronym, and it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The CAPTCHA test allows human users to access a website but keeps bots out. CAPTCHA guards everything, from spammy blog comments to even unauthorized downloads.

A CAPTCHA test will show the users images that are unreadable by bots. With letters, they are usually misshapen, washed out, or mixed up with a lot of gibberish, so only actual humans can interpret them. With images, there’s some sort of distortion that makes it harder for bots to use OCR.

Users need to input what they see into the provided field, and if they answer correctly, they are granted access to the protected web area. The more simple bots will return irregular and incomprehensible letters or click the wrong images, making it obvious that they are not human. 

Advanced bots, on the other hand, can use a variety of strategies to read these distorted images and bypass the test easily. As a result, more sophisticated CAPTCHAs, like Google’s reCAPTCHA, have been developed to increase website security.

Types of CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA is either text-based, picture-based, or sound-based, and the odds are that you’ve encountered all three.

Text CAPTCHAs

These are the most common, and they require you to look at the distorted text to identify the real message. Sometimes they are actual words, and other times, they are plain gibberish, distorted by shape, size, capitalization, or orientation.

If you fail enough text CAPTCHAs, you’ll usually get a prompt to attempt a different method of verification, like a CAPTCHA image.

Picture CAPTCHAs

A CAPTCHA image can be quite troublesome when it doesn’t look like there’s a clear answer. A great example is a picture where you have to select all the grids with traffic lights, even though the light is split between two grids.

Luckily, you can always hit the refresh button to get another image with zero consequences. Or, you could try the audio CAPTCHA.

Audio CAPTCHA

With audio CAPTCHAs, users can listen to a short recording and type the word they hear. These are effective because bots can’t use speech recognition to differentiate the pronounced characters from the background noise in the recording. It may be slightly uncomfortable to hear for humans, but audio CAPTCHAs are quite effective.

Google reCAPTCHA

Google reCAPTCHA is a more advanced version of the CAPTCHA tests. Instead of simply generating a verification test at random, it analyzes your mouse pattern and decides which test to show.

If the system thinks you’re human, you’ll get a simple “I”m, not a robot” checkmark CAPTCHA. Otherwise, you’ll have to complete a more difficult test like clicking all the boats in a group of pictures.

How do hackers bypass CAPTCHA?

Hackers now have an easier time bypassing normal CAPTCHA challenges, and here are some of the strategies they use.

AI

In his book, Deep Learning for Computer Vision with Python, Adrain Rosebrock lays out his strategy for bypassing CAPTCHA on the E-ZPass New York website. His approach included downloading hundreds of example images to train his system because he didn’t have access to the source code and then releasing the learned AI on the system.

CAPTCHAs with an open source code are, in theory, easier to crack because hackers can use the source to train their machine learning system to bypass CAPTCHA tests, regardless of the difficulty. Anybody can pass the exam if you know all the possible questions.

Click farms

Click farms are a little less sophisticated than AI, but they get the job done all the same. In a click farm, underpaid workers click away at websites trying to bypass security measures that are impossible for bots. So while a CAPTCHA may stump a bot, a human will solve CAPTCHAs without difficulty and in quick succession.

CAPTCHA hacking strategies

Hack Tricks lists some of the ways that hackers get around CAPTCHA easily. Some of them include checking your page’s source code for CAPTCHA solutions (in case it’s text) or using an old CAPTCHA value in case they get the same challenge twice.

Other CAPTCHA bypass strategies include:

• Using OCR to read the characters on the screen
• Checking how many images are being used and detecting them with MD5
• Sending the CAPTCHA parameter empty and seeing if that does the trick.

CAPTCHA solving service

Hackers may also use a CAPTCHA solver to gain access to your site. These CAPTCHA solution providers use a variety of approaches we’ve already listed, from AI to click farms and even simple API tools that can bypass CAPTCHA tests under specific circumstances.

These services can be called through simple browser extensions so that they get to work immediately after the bot accesses your site.

Security Bugs

In 2018, a security researcher found a bug that allowed him to bypass Google’s reCAPTCHA. The basic gist is that web apps using reCAPTCHA have to create the request in a specific way, and sometimes, the request is insecure. When this happened, attackers could bypass the reCAPTCHA every single time. (Andres Riancho)

The bug has since been patched, and it’s no longer possible to recreate the reCAPTCHA bypass. However, this is a prime example of how attackers can exploit bugs and weaknesses to bypass your site’s CAPTCHA.

Why Google reCAPTCHA is harder to bypass

What’s interesting is that reCAPTCHA analyzes user macro behavior and adapts the challenges as necessary. So, for example, most bots will never get the “I’m not a robot” test because they don’t engage with web pages the way a human does.

Even when they encounter the simple checkmark prompt, it’s not as simple as ticking the box. If it were, the bots could grab the images on the screen, use OCR, and find out where to click.

These tests also analyze the pattern of mouse movement when you go to click. Human mouse movements are very clunky and jerky, and when the CAPTCHA detects that, it lets you through. A robot will move more smoothly and trigger a harder test.

What happens when hackers crack your CAPTCHA?

Any independent hacker can get past your CAPTCHA by simply filling it as a human would. The danger rises when they are able to bypass your CAPTCHA with bots. That means they can bombard your server with many requests, overload your resources, or possibly, steal your data. 

Increased spam

Without an effective CAPTCHA “gatekeeper,” you can expect spam comments that advertise everything from malicious services to other websites. If your website is set to approve comments first, they won’t appear to the general public. However, you’ll be drowned by dozens or even hundreds of irrelevant comments on the backend.

Invalid analytics data

Bots will skew the traffic on your web page and render your analytic data useless. If hackers figure out a way to get past your CAPTCHA, you may notice a spike in traffic with zero conversions or find that users are abandoning their carts, and you won’t be able to figure out why.

Insecure shopping checkout

If you own an eCommerce website, a bypassed CAPTCHA means that hackers can now access user accounts, make purchases with stolen cards, and even access other sensitive areas of your website.

Database access

If you don’t have CAPTCHA set up for your website login, then you might want to consider adding it. Bots can be used to access poorly secured user accounts and perform account takeovers. They can also access your online databases and even perform other forms of content based fraud on your site.

Fewer web resources

With access to your website, bots will bombard your website, submitting connection requests and taking up finite resources. That means that legitimate users will have slowed or even nonexistent access to your website, which can be damaging to your business. Statistics show that 53% of people will go to a competitor if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load (Digital).

What can you do about CAPTCHA bypassing bots?

Add reCAPTCHA to your website

reCAPTCHA is much harder to bypass than CAPTCHA, so it’s a good idea to add it to your website. It’s free to use for the first 1 million assessments on your website per month, easy to install, and all you have to do is sign up for an API key pair for your site.

The specific instructions are laid out on the dedicated instructions page.

Bot Zapping by ClickCease

ClickCease’s Bot Zapping adds an additional layer of security to your website, stopping the most common forms of automated traffic from accessing your site. The service scans your visitor activity for telltale signs of bot presence and blocks them from interacting with your website.

That means even if they get through your CAPTCHA, Bot Zapping will identify and purge them from your website, allowing only genuine customers to get through.

The bottom line

Hacker tactics are becoming more sophisticated as they get better at bypassing simple defense systems like CAPTCHA, but luckily, you also have access to advanced measures. 

Bot Zapping from ClickCease will make sure those automated programs don’t bypass CAPTCHAs or mess with your marketing channels or forms. Currently, Bot Zapping works with WordPress sites only.

Try ClickCease for FREE for 7 days and see how much of a difference blocking automated traffic makes to your site.

The post How Fraudsters Use Bots to Bypass CAPTCHAs appeared first on ClickCease Blog.

And that’s where device fingerprinting comes in.

Many fraud detection and prevention services now provide device fingerprinting, including us here at ClickCease.

But what is device fingerprinting, how does it work, and is it enough to stop fraud in its tracks?

What is device fingerprinting?

Device fingerprinting is the identification of a device by readily accessible data such as the operating system, browser in use, and even some of the hardware on the device. It is also sometimes referred to as machine fingerprinting.

The process of device fingerprinting is usually performed by software to track whether a device is genuine or not. 

However, it can also be performed by apps and some websites with the necessary software installed.

Data included in device fingerprinting will usually include:

• IP address
• Device model and other hardware information such as processor chip and number of cores
• Display information, including the screen resolution or graphics card used
• Font information
• Operating system version
• Browser used and version
• Battery information
• System language settings
• System time zone 
• Browser cookies
• Information about any VPNs or other software used
• The user agent or UA string
• SSL/TLS information 
• Other network information 

This information is conveyed using the device hash, also called the hardware hash. This information can be requested by the software in question and is used to create a unique profile of a device: the device fingerprint or device ID.

The importance of the device hash

This device hash is perhaps the most important element in identifying a device’s fingerprint. With this unique form of machine identification, services such as ClickCease can be used to understand online activity types.

The term hash refers to the string of information. There are other forms of hash, including:

Browser hash – The data relating to the browser used, the machine, and the OS it’s running on. The browser hash remains the same even if the user uses a VPN or clears their cookies. Browser fingerprinting is another way to identify fraudulent behavior, which we’ll look at shortly…

Cookie hash – Nope, not those snacks you had at that music festival last year. This relates to the data within a browser session, such as sites visited and other activities performed within the browser. This information is stored in the web cookies and is reset after every session – so a cookie hash will change

Device hash – The unique verifying data used to identify the device in question and a key element of device fingerprinting

These other forms of hashing are also used in fraud detection but are unique elements that do not have a bearing on the action of device fingerprinting.

How does device fingerprinting work?

Building a clear picture of which devices are interacting with your website, app, or service can help you identify who is doing what on your site. For example, a common way for ad fraud or click fraud to bypass filters is to change their IP address.

If a platform such as Google Ads sees that a specific IP address is clicking multiple times on an ad, it can add that IP address to an exclusion list so that it doesn’t see that ad anymore. This is one of the main methods of click fraud prevention used by ad platforms.

But by changing the IP address every time, the same device can continue to perform the same fraudulent activity. As far as Google is concerned, this is a new device every time.

Other ways to hide include user agent spoofing, or UA spoofing, which is when the device provides fake system information to the platform making the request.

But with a device fingerprint, there is, in theory, nowhere to hide.  

Once that hardware and the corresponding system have been identified, it’s very hard to change that information.

What is device spoofing?

One of the main ways that fraudsters bypass device fingerprinting is to use device spoofing. This is a process where the machine will present inaccurate information about the device being used so that, for example, a server tower in Pakistan can appear to be a laptop running Chrome from the USA, or an Android phone in Kazakhstan can appear to be an iPhone in Australia.

Spoofing a device is also not that complicated. There are commonly used browsers, browser extensions, and easily accessible developer tools which make device spoofing relatively simple.  

With the rise in awareness around data privacy, more people than ever are using privacy tools. Although this usually means ad blockers or tools for blocking ad trackers, device spoofing tools are also a popular way for more advanced users to be anonymous online.

What is device or machine fingerprinting used for?

There are several fraudulent activities that rely on changing the device identity or device spoofing. 

• Payment or credit card fraud – also known as carding
• Advertising click fraud – read more in our complete guide to click fraud
• Account takeover or brute force attacks
• Spam attacks such as spam injection 

Often these cybercrimes rely on switching between multiple (virtual) devices to successfully carry out their aims. By switching IP addresses or spoofing their device ID, they can usually slide past the off-the-shelf fraud protection used by many platforms.

But by using device fingerprinting to verify the device, fraudsters find it much harder to pull the virtual wool over the digital eyes of the specific platform.

For example, with ad fraud, fraudsters will use bots to try and process multiple clicks on a display ad. The same might also happen with a business competitor who has hired a click farm to click your search ads multiple times until it disappears from the search results.

This activity can happen usually thanks to either the use of VPNs or proxy servers – in effect, the user string changes each time, so the platform thinks someone new is clicking.

But when using device fingerprinting, suspicious behavior from a specific laptop, phone, or tablet can be flagged and, if necessary, blocked. 

By tracking the activity from a user’s device or tracking device info, you can ensure this kind of malicious activity is blocked.

How ClickCease uses the device fingerprint to spot fraud

Although device fingerprinting is a key element in the fight against click fraud and ad fraud, it isn’t the only tool in the kit. But by understanding how device fingerprinting helps to identify users’ behavior, you can start to see its relevance.

IP addresses

Shared IP addresses are not always a surefire sign of fraud. For example, you might be working in a cafe or airport lounge with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of other people, all using the same WiFi connection. In this instance, multiple clicks from the same IP address are unlikely to be fraudulent. 

However, there are other instances where multiple fraudulent devices might be using the same IP address or hiding behind a VPN to perform their fraud. Talking of which…

VPNs and Proxies

Many people use VPNs and proxy servers for legitimate use – for example, if they want to access data from other countries or simply don’t want people to track them online.  

But by contrast, click farms will also use VPNs and proxy servers to switch their IP addresses regularly or even appear as if they are somewhere else. By using methods to identify the devices, it’s clearer that some form of fraud is occurring. 

Data mismatch

One of our metrics for fraudulent ad traffic at ClickCease is the out-of-geo click. Advertisers targeting a specific area or region might get ad traffic from areas outside their target zone. This is often a result of bot traffic routing through data centers or click farms using VPNs and proxies to hide their true location.

This can also happen with devices claiming to be an iPhone or laptop but are actually those data center servers or click farm devices.  

Of course, with machine fingerprinting, you have access to the data which reveals the true location and identity of the user device. If there is a data mismatch, then we have good reason to block it due to fraud, especially if there are other fraudulent actions taking place.  

Is device fingerprinting effective in preventing fraud?

Although device fingerprinting is an effective tracking method to monitor a visitor’s device, it isn’t totally effective on its own. Most fraud prevention tools, including ClickCease, will use other tracking methods and data points such as cookie data, device information, click frequency, and other custom rules.   

And because device fingerprinting is not a new technology, fraudsters are aware of it and have techniques to get around this form of tracking.

One typical way to avoid device fingerprinting is to use private or incognito mode on a browser. There are also specific web browsers that hide the user’s fingerprint data. More advanced users might try disabling Javascript on their devices, as this is one of the main methods of conveying information.

Fraud and digital advertising

Click fraud or ad fraud is currently the biggest and most lucrative form of online fraud. It’s often seen as a victimless crime by the perpetrators, as stealing from the ad platforms is viewed more as a Robin Hood-style stealing from the rich rather than defrauding advertisers.

In addition to this, advertisers are often focused on the metrics of getting the most impressions and clicks on their ads.

Against this backdrop, the challenge of advertising click fraud cost the marketing industry over $41 billion in 2021 alone. And this number has been steadily increasing year on year since, well… Since the start of digital advertising.

Marketers are more aware than ever of the problem of click fraud and ad fraud and taking steps to ensure they target legitimate users with their ad campaigns. Using fraud detection and blocking tools to track users and stop fake clicks has become a cost-effective way to reduce click wastage and improve return on ad spend.

And by combining device fingerprinting and other methods to verify legitimate users, ClickCease has become the industry choice for click fraud prevention.  

If you run PPC ads on Google Ads, Meta for Business ads, or Microsoft Ads, you should run a traffic audit to check your exposure to fraud. With a free trial of ClickCease, you can monitor the clicks you get for yourself and see.

Get your FREE 7-day trial today and see who really clicks your ads!

The post What is Device Fingerprinting & What is it Used For? 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.