Bad Bots: What are the business verticals most targeted by them?

Today’s cybercriminals are smarter than ever. They make use of cutting-edge tools and the latest technologies to breach in the private data of the business. However, when it comes to the data sought by hackers, it may vary from medical records to banking credentials, confidential research, pricing information, and more. The purposes of attacking someone’s digital marketing platforms include financial gains and damaging business reputation.

Sometimes, these criminals write and deploy sophisticated bots to break into the business’s security and access user accounts, disrupt the availability of the service, and take advantage of vulnerabilities in APIs and applications. On the other hand, businesses deploy bad bots to aggregate data and to scrape the content. They do this to target their competitors. As a result, the use of website scraping tools by businesses has been increased over the past few years.

In this post, we will look at the most commonly targeted business verticals by bad bots. Let’s have a look:

• E-Commerce

All thanks to the dependency of individuals on smartphones and the internet, the e-commerce industry is constantly growing. In 2019, the e-commerce industry grew by 15%. However, this vertical industry is not safe from bad bot attacks. In recent times, e-commerce has reported a sudden rise in attacks by bad bots on mobile apps, web applications, and APIs.

From content scraping to payment fraud, inventory holdups, coupon scraping, cart abandonment, and account takeover, these are some common reasons for the occurrence of bad bot attacks. Any disruption in digital marketing platforms directly affects the company’s revenue and reputation. For this reason, most e-commerce companies invest a lot of money, and time is securing their digital applications.

• Online marketplaces and classifieds

When it comes to online marketplaces and classifieds, they mostly depend on the trust and credibility of their consumers to grow. Since these companies attract an enormous amount of traffic, they get benefitted by performing advertisements for startups and other businesses. They mainly focus on protecting ads from scraping by competitors, which is used to collect users’ information by running scripts.  Therefore, there is a lot of bad bot traffic against the homepage.

• Media & publishing

Several good bots are used by media and publishing outlets for advertising and related programs. But they also face some major challenges such as correcting marketing analytic and filtering out bad bot traffic. In this business vertical as well, the bad bot attacks are common by competitors and ad platforms.

• Travel & hospitality

Travel & hospitality companies like hotel chains, airlines, and transportation heavily depend on the online space for purchases. Hackers use human-like and distributed mutating boys to break into security measures of these sites.

Among all the bot attacks in the travel industry, denial of inventory is the most common. Nearly 29% of traffic generated, comes from the booking sections. These bots can keep the inventory on hold as much as bot herder wants, and make it unavailable for real users. As a result, the victim may experience an immediate financial loss.

If you own any of these vertical businesses and want to secure web applications from bad bot attacks, hire an experienced company that offers services such as web scraper development, and web crawler development. We, at SoftProdigy, have experts who have vast knowledge in developing web scraper and help you protect your applications from bad bot attacks.

Summary – Cyberattacks have become more common than ever. These days, hackers use sophisticated bots to breach the security of business’ systems to take control over accounts, steal confidential information, and more. Learn about these business verticals.