Research by cybersecurity company Imperva shows that ‘bot traffic’ on gambling and betting sites increased before and during Euro 2020.
Research shows that bot activity on global gambling and gambling sites increased by 96% in the weeks leading up to the tournament, while they increased by 26% in April alone.
In the week before the start of their campaigns in England and Scotland, operators were “strongly targeted”; the days when England played were “particularly high risk, with takeover attacks”.
Account takeover attacks are designed to enter accounts and obtain digital wallets from players on gambling sites; these increased two or three times when England played, compared to other days.
The UK wasn’t the only target, with bot traffic also increasing on German sites; there was a peak of 41% in the week following Germany’s victory over Portugal.
Imperva Research Labs said there was “an ever-increasing pattern of attacks as the tournament progressed, with a notable spike occurring on June 26, which marked the beginning of the round of 16.”
Edward Roberts, Director of Strategy, Application Security at Imperva, gave the following testimony about the case:
“This level of sustained bot activity is unprecedented for sports gaming venues and indicates that bot operators are developing their tactics.”
“Euro 2020 is the first major international tournament where, thanks to Covid-19, typical revenue sources like ticket scalps have disappeared.”
“As a result, bot operators have restructured their tactics to target the rest of us watching at home instead. With so many people carrying their accounts with hefty sums, getting access is an easy money source for criminals, especially VIP customers who tend to bet large amounts”.
What is ‘Bot Traffic’?
‘Bot traffic’ is the part of online traffic that gives rise to activities artificially generated by automated bots and spiders. Regarding its identification for analysis, it is not so easy to be evaluated.
According to Shield Square, after having analyzed more than 1 million websites, they identified that about 50% of web traffic is made up of bots.
Given the scenario, bots are a major concern for all associations. While there are good bots that analyze the site for positive purposes like SEO, unfortunately not all bots are good, and some can harm the site, and ultimately, business.
In a way, hacker groups are also very organized. They also harness the power of automation to speed up tasks—like running cybernetics. For this reason, automated bot programs are prevalent in which hackers don’t even need to put in much effort.
Instead, they use these programs to run automated tasks and scripts for compromise websites and spread malware, for example.
