With the festive season on the horizon, retailers are gearing up to handle the annual upsurge in online (and in-store) footfall. However, this uptick in activity also draws the attention of malicious actors seeking to exploit vulnerabilities for their benefit.
An extensive cyber guide for holiday shopping was recently released by Imperva, a Thales affiliate. Data analysis spanning six months (April 2024 – September 2024) conducted by the Imperva Threat Research team highlighted the critical importance for retailers to be vigilant about AI-powered threats. The proliferation and advancement of generative AI tools and large language models (LLMs) have enabled cybercriminals to scale and enhance their attacks on eCommerce platforms.
According to Imperva Threat Research, retail websites collectively face an average of 569,884 AI-driven attacks daily. Identifying the types of threats contributing to these attacks and taking measures to thwart them is paramount for retailers safeguarding their business and clientele during the holiday season.
Primary Role of Business Logic Exploitation in AI-Based Online Retail Threats
Business logic exploitation emerges as the predominant AI-driven attack vector on retail platforms, constituting 30.7% of all assaults. This form of attack transpires when threat actors misuse an application’s intended functions to achieve unauthorized objectives. For example, they may manipulate promotional codes or exploit return policies to obtain goods or services at a reduced cost. Nearly half of all retailers have encountered instances of business logic exploitation, as indicated by Imperva.
The threat’s severity is compounded by AI’s knack for scrutinizing user behavioral patterns and pinpointing potential vulnerabilities. Leveraging AI to devise more efficient exploitation stratagems, attackers necessitate retailers to implement rigorous controls for monitoring and validating user interactions on their ecosystems. Without these protective mechanisms, businesses face substantial financial losses and harm to their standing.
Enduring Peril of DDoS Onslaughts
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) assaults are nearly as prevalent as business logic exploitation, accounting for 30.6% of AI-driven threats to retailers — a figure that keeps escalating. Referring to the Imperva 2024 DDoS Threat Landscape report, application-layer DDoS attacks on retail sites have surged by 61% from the preceding year.
Application-layer DDoS attacks pose a substantial menace to online retailers, particularly as they brace for heightened traffic during the festive shopping spree. Cybercriminals can harness AI to orchestrate intricate DDoS campaigns that inundate retail portals, rendering them inoperable.
The financial ramifications of a successful DDoS attack can be crippling, with businesses contending with revenue depletion, augmented recovery outlay, and potential long-term impairment to their brand integrity. To counter this threat, retailers should invest in robust DDoS mitigation solutions adept at identifying and neutralizing attacks before they disrupt operations.
Menace of Grinch Bots Persists
Sinister bots have grown more sophisticated, frequently employing AI algorithms to mimic human behavior and circumvent security protocols. Bad bot incursions accounted for 20.8% of all AI-generated attacks on retail platforms. These automated threats wreak havoc on regular business functions, capable of scraping pricing data, executing credential stuffing assaults, and setting up spurious accounts.
During the festive season, retailers must exercise caution concerning Grinch bots — an advanced scalping bot that monitors online inventories and procures the most coveted seasonal items for resale at exorbitant markups. These bots impede holiday sales and product launches, making it arduous for consumers to purchase highly popular items.
The automation prowess of AI accelerates the propagation of bad bot incursions, rendering detection and mitigation more arduous. Retailers need to enhance their bot detection capabilities to distinguish genuine users from malevolent bots. Neglecting this aspect can lead to revenue loss, inventory discrepancies, and a decline in customer satisfaction.
Emerging Concern Over API Breaches
With retailers increasingly relying on APIs to facilitate transactions and integrate third-party services, API breaches have emerged as a pressing woe, constituting 16.1% of AI-triggered assaults on retailers. Threat actors can leverage AI to uncover and exploit vulnerabilities in APIs, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data in the process.
The retail sector grapples with an average of 5,570 API attacks daily, with the majority classified as API breaches. The potential fallout from API breaches is severe, encompassing data breaches, financial deceit, and erosion of customer trust. Retailers must accord priority to API security by instituting stringent access regulations, conducting routine security evaluations, and deploying AI-driven monitoring tools to identify aberrant API usage patterns.
Cybersecurity Pointers for a Safe and Secure Festive Season
The upcoming festive season presents a dual scenario for retailers: a boon in consumer spending and an augmented risk of cyber threats. With AI tools proliferating, eCommerce enterprises will face increasingly sophisticated threats that exploit vulnerabilities and perpetrate fraud with heightened accuracy.
To fortify their websites and clientele, retailers should heed the following cybersecurity recommendations:
- Anticipate Elevated Online Footfall: Retailers must brace themselves for a surge in online visits during the festive shopping period. They should ensure that their infrastructure can handle this surge without compromising performance. This involves scaling servers, utilizing a content delivery network (CDN) for efficient traffic distribution, and adopting a waiting room queuing system to regulate traffic influx and maintain equitable access for genuine users during peak durations.
- Craft a Bot Management Plan: Alongside genuine shoppers, retailers should expect a surge in malevolent bot traffic. A robust bot management strategy is vital to shield their platforms and guarantee a seamless shopping experience for legitimate customers. Key steps entail risk assessment, entry point identification, blocking obsolete user agents, restricting proxies, implementing rate limits, and monitoring for signs of automation or headless browsers.
- Safeguard Against Business Logic Exploitation: AI enables attackers to automate business logic exploitation at scale, rendering these attacks harder to detect. To counter such threats, retailers should enforce strict validation on all user inputs, utilize anomaly detection mechanisms to spot atypical activities, and conduct periodic evaluations of their business processes to pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities.
- Invest in a DDoS Countermeasure: DDoS attacks seek to overwhelm website resources, leading to downtime that can result in revenue loss and reputational damage, particularly during peak shopping periods. Retailers should invest in a DDoS defense solution leveraging machine learning to identify and counter malicious traffic promptly, ensuring legitimate customers can access services without interruption.
- Secure APIs: To proactively combat automated application and API abuse, retailers should establish a baseline for expected API behavior, encompassing typical traffic rates and user demographics. This baseline aids in detecting anomalies, like unusual spikes in less-utilized APIs, signaling possible malicious activities. Additionally, applying session and IP-based rate limits can curb abuse, while maintaining a user activity audit trail eases monitoring and investigation of potential threats.
By comprehending the nature of AI-driven assaults and preparing for the challenges they pose, retailers can better fortify their operations and ensure a secure shopping environment for their customers. Sustained vigilance and adoption of advanced security technologies are imperative to keep abreast of evolving cybercriminal stratagems and guarantee a secure holiday shopping season for both retailers and customers.
This article is a contributed piece from one of our esteemed partners.
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