Cybersecurity professionals have warned the public about an uptick in e-commerce risks before major holidays. However, new information shows that e-commerce bots are more frequently using domain registration services to conduct mass account fraud. According to Jason Kent, a cybersecurity professional at Cequence Security, attackers are using domain parking and monetization services to register multiple domains. An investigation into shopping-bot campaign data lead to the discovery of more than 850,000 fake accounts associated with a small number of domains.
In addition, clusters and common patters were able to lead researchers to domain-name registration and hosting services as the permitting factor, while parking, monetization, and email forwarding were used commonly among the threat actors to execute large-scale shopping bot campaigns. Cequence Security states that retailers should analyze historic data to uncover patterns from suspicious domains using the same hosting infrastructure. This includes irregular names, domains resolving to untrusted web apps, or domains without SSL enabled.
