By/ Kelly Jackson Higgins Posted on 6/24/2014
Online fraudsters and cyber criminals -- and even corporate competitors -- rely heavily on bots, and an emerging startup aims to quickly spot bots in action.
There are massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that saturate a targeted website or network with unwanted traffic and knock it offline -- and then there are what renowned security expert Dan Kaminsky calls "resource-based DDoS" attacks that his startup White Ops increasingly is catching in action.
It's where stealthy bots are used to automate database lookups such that they ultimately sap performance for legitimate site visitors. Take a recent case where more than 20% of a major global retailer's website traffic during the Christmas holiday season came from stealthy bots recruited by its competitors to scrape in bulk pricing information from the retailer. "It's competitive intelligence" and it's happening en masse, says Michael Tiffany, CEO of White Ops, a bot-detection firm. "Everyone is spying on everyone to get everyone's prices."
DarkReading/ full read here/ http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/battling-the-bot-nation/d/d-id/1278835?
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