Automated threats leading cause of security incidents for online retailers

Sixty-two percent of cybersecurity incidents against online retailers stemmed from automated threats including account takeover, web scraping, API exploitation, credit card fraud, Grinch bots, and distributed denial-of-service attacks making automated attacks against retailers more than two times higher than other industries, reports VentureBeat. Retailer websites have been targeted by increasingly sophisticated malicious bots, with anonymity framework-based attacks spiking from 3.5% to 32.9% during the past year, compared with an increase from 1.6% to 13.6% for other sectors, an Imperva Threat Research analysis revealed. Moreover, bad bot traffic on e-commerce sites was observed to rise by 10% and another 34% in October and November last year, respectively, amid the holiday shopping season. Last year also saw API attacks grow by 35% from September to October before increasing by another 22% in November. Imperva recommended the implementation of bot management systems and stress-testing infrastructure in retailer websites in an effort to avert automated attacks.