New Delhi, Dec 3 (IANS): Amid the online shopping spree during the holiday season, security researchers with Barracuda Networks, a leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, have detected millions of bad bots attacks on e-commerce websites.
These bad bots attacks were used by cybercriminals to run distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, make fraudulent purchases, and scan for vulnerabilities they can exploit, the company said.
"While analysing which Internet System Provider or Autonomous System Number has been the source of this bad bot activity, our researchers identified Indian mobile provider Airtel's subnet ranges in the mix, as well as some of the big public cloud providers like Google Cloud, Amazon," Murali Urs, Country Manager-India, Barracuda Networks, said in a statement.
"This shows that even though the source of bots is international, it would depend on the bot and the site it is targeting."
Barracuda Networks said it detected the bad bots attacks in November.
The company said that its security researchers ran the "Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection" in front of a test web application, and detected a staggering number of bad bots in just a few days with millions of attacks coming in from thousands of distinct IP addresses.
Bad bot personas are bots that have been identified as malicious based on their pattern of behaviour.
They are grouped by "User-Agent", some of which are good. For example, GoogleBot, which crawls sites and adds them to search rankings, is good and should not be blocked.
Cybercriminals have been using different ways to spoof good "User-Agents" to conduct the attacks.
The bad bots spoof these known good User-Agents, which would need deeper scrutiny to tell them apart.
With the holiday shopping season expected to continue in full swing till the New Year, e-commerce teams should start taking necessary steps to safeguard their applications against bad bots, Barracuda Networks said.
They must install a well-configured web application firewall as a service solution and make sure that the application security solutions include anti-bot protection to effectively detect advanced automated attacks, the company added.