As Valentine's Day approaches, it's expected that sales for select products will shoot up ahead of the celebration. It's also expected that more customers will shop gifts for their loved ones; that's why online retailers will be on the lookout for the surge of people.
At the same time, this is the day when cybercriminals take advantage of the situation. This is also the perfect time to launch bots to attack the sales of some establishments.
These threat actors could compromise customers' information as well as pull off payment fraud. With that, here's where you can spot malicious bots and how you can protect yourself from them.
Hype Sales For Valentine's Day
According to a report by Security Boulevard, one of the perfect targets during Valentine's Day is the huge hype sales. Since the event is widely-commercialized, people will automatically rush to the stores to opt-in for huge discounts for their chosen gifts.
However, it's also important to pay attention to the influx of customers since bad bots can emerge from anywhere. Scalpers often deploy these bots to hoard products and resell them at a higher price to earn a big profit.
As malicious bots occupy a particular website, the site traffic could increase every minute. As an online retailer, you aim to prevent these bots from flooding your site to avoid absurd processing costs.
Gift Cards
This Valentine's Day, expect that many customers will be taking advantage of physical and online gift cards. This is also the season where bots are deployed to steal money from unaware buyers.
In some cases, some cards are being stolen from the users. Later, the hackers will sell them before someone gifts the physical card to another person.
As such, online retailers should pay attention to these gift cards since they could prompt security threats for them and the customers.
Coupon and Promotion
Considering that many people will definitely be on the lookout for Valentine's coupons, you might as well pay more attention to the promotion of sales. While these are helpful for businesses, let's not forget that cybercriminals may lurk unexpectedly and abuse these coupons.
The hackers could push through sign-up offers multiple times and even sell "fake" accounts for people who want to receive a huge discount.
How to Protect Your Profit From Bots This Upcoming Valentine's Day
For online retailers, the utmost priority that you should be doing is to protect your earnings from the cybercriminals who plan to steal from you. Here are the necessary steps that you should take to safeguard your hard-earned money.
- Conduct analysis for bots and identify vulnerable websites that they could compromise.
- Implement a zero-tolerance policy for several platforms to get rid of bots from the website traffic.
- Revise ineffective strategies that could negatively impact your sales. In short, optimize your plan for your sales.
- Inform the customers regarding the malicious websites and notify them about phishing and hacking schemes.
- Apply the bot mitigation solution to assess the attacks and prevent them from happening next time.
Meanwhile, Malwarebytes wrote the steps to follow if you want the Valentines' Day scam.
Read our latest report about Google Cloud's Virtual Machine Threat Detection and Sugar ransomware for more cybersecurity-related articles.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joseph Henry
