In late June, Akamai released a report detailing the threats facing online businesses today. The report, Scraping Away Your Bottom Line: How Web Scrapers Impact Ecommerce, found that scraper bots account for 42% of all web traffic, 65% of which is malicious.
The e-commerce sector suffers the most from bots and scrapers. Online stores are attacked by competitors and cyber fraudsters who:
This has a negative impact on both the end result and the quality of customer service. Unfortunately, there are currently no laws that would prohibit the use of scraper bots.
The rise of AI-powered botnets is making attacks harder to detect. According to Patrick Sullivan, technical director of security strategy at Akamai, bots remain a huge problem for online businesses. Cybercriminals most often use scraping to steal content and create duplicate sites. Their tactics are varied, including using headless browsers to hide their attacks.
The report also found that AI botnets are able to search for and parse unstructured data, which is less consistently formatted or arranged. In addition, botnets are already able to use real business analytics to improve decision-making by collecting, extracting, and then processing data.
According to Akamai experts, scraper bots are capable of generating sophisticated phishing campaigns by parsing product images, descriptions, and prices. In this way, they create fake catalogs and phishing sites aimed at stealing user credentials or banking information.
Additionally, fraudsters use bots to abuse new account creation, which, according to recent research, accounts for up to 50% of fraud losses.
Some of the consequences that companies face as a result of data scraping, whether it was done with malicious intent or for selfish purposes, include: decreased site performance, corrupted metrics, attacks using compromised credentials, increased resource performance costs, and more.
The e-commerce sector suffers the most from bots and scrapers. Online stores are attacked by competitors and cyber fraudsters who:
- carry out commercial espionage,
- buy up goods,
- create clone sites for phishing, etc.
This has a negative impact on both the end result and the quality of customer service. Unfortunately, there are currently no laws that would prohibit the use of scraper bots.
The rise of AI-powered botnets is making attacks harder to detect. According to Patrick Sullivan, technical director of security strategy at Akamai, bots remain a huge problem for online businesses. Cybercriminals most often use scraping to steal content and create duplicate sites. Their tactics are varied, including using headless browsers to hide their attacks.
The report also found that AI botnets are able to search for and parse unstructured data, which is less consistently formatted or arranged. In addition, botnets are already able to use real business analytics to improve decision-making by collecting, extracting, and then processing data.
According to Akamai experts, scraper bots are capable of generating sophisticated phishing campaigns by parsing product images, descriptions, and prices. In this way, they create fake catalogs and phishing sites aimed at stealing user credentials or banking information.
Additionally, fraudsters use bots to abuse new account creation, which, according to recent research, accounts for up to 50% of fraud losses.
Some of the consequences that companies face as a result of data scraping, whether it was done with malicious intent or for selfish purposes, include: decreased site performance, corrupted metrics, attacks using compromised credentials, increased resource performance costs, and more.
