Don't let Grinch bots put smut in your stocking

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From a cybersecurity perspective, the end of 2021 was marked by two noteworthy events: the zero-day Log4j exploit and the widespread use of Grinch bots. While the former has hopefully been resolved, although still resented by security teams, the latter has no easy fix. To make matters more difficult, we expect to see an increase in bots impacting both the online shopping experience and retail organizations heading into 2023. Ultimately, it will take a industry-wide effort to combat these bots and bring joy back to virtual shopping. .

Much like its namesake, a Grinch bot is actively working to steal gifts from under the noses of holiday shoppers. Grinch bots are designed to quickly buy products online as they become available. These bots are often created to buy a product on sale and then resell it for a profit. The advantage of using a bot to make these purchases is that it can move faster than human shoppers, picking up entire stocks of a product in seconds.

These Grinch bots, and other bot attacks, don't just harm consumers, however. Think about it: If a bot is programmed to select a product's inventory from a store and choose the in-store pickup option, and it never picks up or pays for the product, the store's inventory will be frozen. And when a bot makes fraudulent purchases, brands will still have to pay transaction fees by credit card, which could lead to a brand being removed from point-of-sale platforms. Transaction fees and frozen inventory can be both crippling to brands and their ability to do business.

Ultimately, bots hurt the customer experience and damage a brand's reputation. In fact, a recent survey found that for 97% of organizations, bot attacks had an impact on customer satisfaction. In one particularly egregious example, a popular shoe brand discovered that 97% of traffic for an online sale was bots. Needless to say, this probably left the majority of human customers with a negative shopping experience. Consumers now expect a level playing field and a level playing field when it comes to online shopping. As supply chains are still strained, restocking inventory that has fallen victim to bot attacks can become costly and time-consuming.

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It has become such a big issue that the US Congress has even stepped in and proposed a "Stopping Grinch Bots Act" to try to clamp down on these bots. Although the law has not yet been passed, brands can still take steps to thwart bots, improve customer experience, and protect inventory from cybercriminals. Bot traffic grew 106% year over year...