Security News > 2020 > November > Scalper-Bots Shake Down Desperate PS5, Xbox Series X Shoppers

It's a big week for gamers across the globe, with imminent, dueling releases of Xbox Series X and PlayStation PS5. However, an army of retail bots threaten to drive prices up as much as three times the retail price, putting the coveted holiday gifts well out of reach of everyday fans.

"Since most retailers have built their environments for high-speed and high-volume transactions, the bots are being supported by the environment that is trying to keep them out. The effort to build a retail store that delights customers and enables transactions plays right into the bot creators' hands."

Kent pointed out these bots are acting similarly to the types of bot-driven distributed denial-of-service attacks that retailers combat regularly, and he added that applying artificial intelligence and machine learning are effective tools to combat these superpowered scalpers, "Even if they are attempting 50,000 transactions per second."

"There has been an escalation in the CAPTCHA fight over the last few years, bots have gotten better at identifying and passing CAPTCHA, so CAPTCHA companies, such as Google, have had to develop more complex CAPTCHAs based on the nature of the traffic." Liska said.

Bots are becoming more ubiquitous and more sophisticated, even developing the ability to mimic human behaviors to evade detection.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/scalper-bots-shake-down-desperate-ps5-xbox-series-x-shoppers/161090/