How Bot attacks are hampering eCommerce business

How Bot attacks are hampering eCommerce business

Frequent data breaches are encouraging cybercriminals and bot attacks on genuine websites.

In order to hijack various customer accounts and steal sensitive information for fulfilling their malicious intentions, cybercriminals are using automated bots for accomplishing data breaches.

This encourages attackers to carry out this hijacking at a higher level.

Web Bot Attacks: The Biggest Threat For E-commerce Store Owners

From stealing sensitive product information to purchasing exclusive items and selling them at a higher rate to customers, bots are not far behind in causing harm to e-commerce stores. Another action includes hacking customer accounts to gain gift cards and commit credit frauds.

Bot Attacks: Easiest Option For Cybercriminals

One of the biggest mistakes committed by users of e-commerce platforms is that most of them tend to use very simple passwords such as ‘1234’ or similar patterns. Another fascinating, yet, unfortunate thing is that a lot of users use the same password for their accounts which makes it further easy for attackers to target them. If you are using the same password for your bank account and other essential platforms, you are under immense threat. Same or similar passwords provide hackers with an opportunity to cause even more damage than intended. The most dangerous part is that once the attackers are able to harvest the credentials, it is extremely simple to harvest them.

Let us take a look at what happens to your store and users when it is under a bot attack.

1. Compromised Website Speed

By driving useless and illegitimate traffic to your website, these bots can slow down the speed and increase the loading time of your website. This, in turn, can put off your users and drive them away before they bother to even look at the products.

2. Compromised Analytics Of The Website

By driving illegitimate website traffic, bots make it difficult to track and differentiate between real organic traffic and bot traffic. If the business owners take essential business decisions based on the misguided data, it can turn out to be fatal for the store.

3. Checkout Frauds

If bots hoard products with limited availability, they can make a product appear out of stock when the users make an attempt to check out. This can create a frustrating situation for customers and affect your sales negatively.

4. E-commerce Scalping

E-commerce Scalping refers to hijacking limited availability products on an e-commerce store and reselling them at a higher price on some other store.

5. Credit Card Fraud

By stealing credit card information of the buyers, bad bots can instigate fraudulent transactions and make the users apply for a refund for a compromised transaction. This reflects badly on merchant history and can also ban the seller from accepting credit cards in the future.

6. Exhausting of inventories

Scraping inventories and making items unavailable for real customers to buy is a classic trait of bot attack. They put hundreds of items in the cart and prevent real customers from making a genuine purchase.

An Ever Increasing Threat

The typical scheme most cybercriminals involve an assessment of the targeted website before they hijack and use the credentials to perform an action. From the recent black Friday sale, it is quite evident what bots can do to harm an e-commerce store’s genuineness.

The bots follow a tricky approach in which they act low and slow. This makes an attack extremely difficult to detect. Most of the companies lose about $6 million due to bot attacks but the owners keep mum due to apprehensions of tarnishing their reputation and losing valuable customers. It is mandatory for these companies to look for ways and means that differentiate cyber attacks from real users and prevent their company from undergoing such a massive loss.

One of the major steps to include in protecting themselves from bots is that the stores have to make sure that in this process the customer experience is not compromised in any way. The techniques and tactics should be completely invisible to the customers as they can feel threatened if they sense an impending identity theft which can affect sales.

Tackling Bot Attacks: Finding a Solution

Some of the conventional protection strategies include multi-factor authentication, multi-step logins, out-of-bandwidth authentication, and challenge-response tests. But the problem with these techniques is that they make the users jump through hoops to protect their credentials and identity. Even though these steps can provide the desired results, it can’t be a viable strategy in a world where customers are always on the go and in lieu of saving as much of their time as possible. Even minor friction during a transaction can drive users away.

Tracking users’ behavior can help companies identify fraud if something goes other than normal. Any location, behavior, device or account mismatches can alert the concerned authorities to eliminate the attack at the root.

Cutting bot logins to a great extent without compromising user experience is one of the surest ways to achieve the desired protection.

Author Bio

Kaartik Iyer is the Founder & CEO at Infigic Technologies, a full-service ecommerce agency. Kaartik has contributed to sites like Huffington Post, Yourstory, MultiChannel Merchant, Internet Retailer to name a few.You can connect with him on LinkedIn for a quick chat on any of these topics