Malicious AI-bots are on a holiday shopping spree

AI bots have entered the holiday! Though not as jolly joy spreaders as one could’ve hoped, but as tools for scammers to exploit the season’s shopping spree.

The Problem

During the holiday shopping season, retailers have seen a large increase in fraudulent purchases from bots. This new iteration of bots are able to mimic the average customer, making them more difficult to detect. It allow them to purchase large quantities of high-demand products quickly, perhaps to resell at later times at hiked prices.

They are also able to more effectively identify vulnerabilities in the systems used by the retailers, thus allowing for ransomware, takeover off customer’s accounts, or manipulate prices through discount codes.

Today’s retailers see an average of 560 000 daily such AI-driven attacks.

Solutions

Anyone familiar with the purchasing flow of sites like Amazon know it’s incredibly easy to purchase any product. Once you’ve got your account you’re about 2-3 clicks away from ordering a product – any product.

But the trade-off here is security. Creating additional steps for purchasing online will make the consumer have more opportunities to stop and rethink their choice, which is what retailers, especially online ones, struggle with today. This could somewhat be helped by setting up blocking for malicious domains and IP’s, a practice many companies already adhere to.

A fricitonless approach makes for more opportunity for scammers to exploit and penetrate the process than a process with more security measures set up will.

It’s not an easy trade-off in today’s dopamin-infused world where customers won’t hesitate for a second to swipe along to another retailer!

2024-11-28 02:01