The process to validate an email account that fires on a single click requires an email that has “interacted” with the world by sending emails, viewing YouTube videos, and solving complex CAPTCHAs. Validating Email Credentials – It’s Easy, Right? The (simplified) CAPTCHA will fire but the bot runner will just solve the challenge with a single click and move on. The clean Gmail account is used to create a shopping cart where the threat actor can then add their items and proceed to checkout. The validated accounts are used against the target application, a retailer with a high-demand item for example. Rather than being deterred by this new feature, threat actors launching attacks are leveraging it to expedite the attack. The goal is to present a human-backed account with a different, and potentially easier CAPTCHA experience (single click versus more difficult challenges). As more and more systems are tied to credentials, and because credentials are continually stolen and used for automated attacks, Google is now rating email accounts and that rating then impacts the CAPTCHA services a user is presented with. For a bot to be successful, threat actors need a “clean” IP address (supplied by Bulletproof Proxies), and they need valid credentials. In this blog, I wanted to dig into the creation and use of valid credentials. And our recent blog on Bots-as-a-Service highlights the continued commercialization of the bot market. Our previous infrastructure research on Bulletproof Proxy networks gave us some insight into how threat actors can jump from place to place to appear as normal traffic or avoid IP block-lists.

It definitely keeps us on our toes as we try to understand how each attack component (Tools, Infrastructure, Credentials and Behavior) evolves.

Provides customers with threat monitoring, consulting, and optimization.ĭeploys web application firewall (WAF) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services.Įven after 20 years in the security field, and nearly two years here at Cequence I am continually surprised at how ever-evolving bots impact our customers. Optimizes the discovery of your API attack surface and runtime inventory. Prevent automated API attacks and fraud using the largest API threat database in the world. Surface compliance violations, security risks and test your APIs for critical vulnerabilities.

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