In recent days financial sectors have been high-value targets for cyber-attacks. Attackers have come up with some harmful and sophisticated botnets to enhance the attacks targeting this sector. These attacks have significantly affected the operations of some financial services, losing data and leading to massive losses in the industry. Commonly, we’ve got five popular bad bot attacks that target the financial sector or services.
These common bad bot attacks that target the financial service are account takeover attacks, credit card fraud, scraping content, OWASP threats, and distributed denial service attacks. Read through the article to understand bot management five bad bot attack methods targeting financial services and prevention.
What is Bot Management?
It refers to the appropriate procedures for blocking malicious or undesired internet bot traffic while allowing the helpful ones to continue accessing the web features and properties. The process achieves the restriction of bad attacks by detecting the bots’ activity, differentiation between the undesirable and desirable behaviors before blocking them.
It’s a necessary process, especially for the financial sectors experiencing massive issues due to bad bots attacks. Let’s have an insight into the common bad bots attacks targeting the financial sector and how to prevent them.
Bad Bot Attack Methods Targeting Financial Services and how to prevent them
We’ve got numerous bots on different financial websites, with some having harmful effects. Below are the common bad bots attack methods that target financial services:
- Credit Card Fraud
It’s the most common bad bot attack that targets cracking your credit card. The bots aim to obtain essential credit card details such as private account numbers and the owners’ names. Attackers will use different bots to guess the additional information, later cracking your credit card and using it for their benefit. The attackers can use these bots to crack the credit card individually or on a large scale to scale the process to cracking up to 21600 cards daily.
Prevention
The most suitable prevention methods of such bad bots include:
- Device fingerprinting
It’s an essential security mechanism that aims to connect the device and browser to restrict unauthorized access to the site. Device fingerprinting helps to identify the browsers and device parameters such as cookies and browser identifiers to raise alarms in case of a suspicion login.
- Browser validation
When attacking websites, some malicious bots tend to run a particular browser but later contact the users’ agents to avoid detection. Therefore choosing a proper browser validation is essential as it allows the bots to operate with their actual identity.
Additional methods of preventing these bot attacks are reputation analysis, machine learning behavior analysis, multi-factor authentication, and progressive changes.
- Account Takeover Attacks
Most experts commonly refer to them as credential stuffing, where the attackers breach the financial system using a list of altered user credentials. The malicious bots achieve automation and scaling by assuming that many individuals reuse their passwords and username across different services. After several attempts, the attackers can easily login into your account and cause massive losses.
Prevention
Apart from the multifactor authentication, fingerprinting, and CAPTCHA for preventing them, you can also use:
- IP Blacklisting
It’s an important strategy that aims at limiting the number of IP addresses the attackers can access. This process becomes essential to ensure an effective blockage of any attempt for multi logging in your account.
- Block headless browsers
It’ll be essential to ensure you have a proper mechanism for blocking any headless browsers. It’ll be necessary to block them because they’re a major indicator of suspicious behavior among bots or websites.
- Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
The hackers use a specialized system where they have a particular number of hijacked internet-connected devices. They inject each device with malware to control the activities from a remote location, secretly with the owner’s permission and knowledge. The bots attack the application’s top layer, helping them facilitate a suitable connection over any internet protocol. This process enables them to have more server traffic, making them stop responding, leading to more attacks.
Prevention
Choosing a proper website traffic monitoring strategy is the most effective, easy-to-use, and cost-effective mechanism to protect your site or details from this attack. It protects customers from DDoS attacks by pushing the envelope for a suitable cloud-based mitigation strategy to provide transparent mitigation.
- Content Scraping
It involves attackers using special bots to extract data and content from your website or online financial platform. Attackers use scraper bots, which replicate and extract data from all the databases available. These bots cause massive damage as they hack the system and assess important financial firms’ details such as loan interest rates and other vital financial information. Apart from accessing sensitive financial data, these bots also cause huge traffic on the website, causing inconvenience to the other users and lowering your site’s SEO rankings.
Prevention
Most users prefer using granular traffic analysis to counter the advancement and effects of these malicious bots. The web scraping protection system works to ensure that you only have legitimate traffic (human) to your websites. The protection mechanism uses different verification modes like IP reputation, behavior analysis, progressive challenges, and HTML fingerprint to achieve this objective.
- Account creation
When having your operations online or on different websites, you’ve seen links directing you to create some accounts. Attackers use these malicious bots to direct your website users to create fake accounts. While creating these accounts, the main target of the hackers is to access essential financial and other sensitive information. After getting the financial and other details, they later used to hack the accounts and make several transactions without the owner’s knowledge.
Prevention
Besides using the abnormal traffic control mechanism to control the malicious bots in traffic on your website, experts advise you to sign up for screening suspicious alerts. It’s an important mechanism that works by restricting malicious or harmful bots. It has features that notify you in case of an abnormal rate of account creation on your website. You can control these account creation systems by blocking the additional bots with the fake account creation link.
Conclusion
With the evolving technology and use of websites & the internet for various activities, including financial services, there is a spike in malicious bots that causes harm to these sites. Attackers use malicious bots to attack your financial site and extract important information or your users’ database, which they use to cause massive harm. It’ll be good to avoid this by learning bot management five bad bot attack methods targeting financial services and prevention. This process will help you secure your financial website and databases.