The Most Common Attacks Using Botnets

Summary

This chapter takes a deep dive into the most common attacks leveraging bots against websites, how they are carried out, and their role in broader fraud schemes that lead to revenue generation. It helps the reader to learn about account takeover, scraping, scalping, account opening abuse, inventory hoarding, and more. The chapter reviews the most common forms of abuse on the Internet that involve botnets. It describes account takeover (ATO) attacks in detail and exposes some nuances based on the targeted site's industry. Data harvesting represents the raw material used in any ATO attacks. In general, ATO attacks are not personal. Fraudsters simply exploit the data they bought on the dark web but do not target anyone in particular. Instead, they target everyone except, in some scenarios. Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. Information is collected using automated software applications (bots) and structured into a usable form.