I don’t follow the Eurovision Song Contest closely, but I know that ABBA famously won decades ago with “Waterloo” and that a few other contest winners — Celine Dion, Måneskin — have achieved global success afterwards. This year, though, an article about Eurovision got my attention. It seems that tickets to the live Eurovision performances in the UK (hosting in place of last year’s winner, Ukraine, for fairly obvious reasons) have been bought up by bots. Bot operators bought up as many Eurovision tickets as they could and quickly made them available on resale sites at huge markups. This should sound familiar to Taylor Swift fans in the US, whose recent attempts to get tickets to the Eras tour were stymied by bot attacks on Ticketmaster.

These types of inventory hoarding (aka scalping bots) are just one of the ways that malicious bots can disrupt your business and frustrate your customers. Other bad bots include:

  • Credential stuffing/account takeover bots that attempt to take over valid customer accounts by rapidly trying thousands of previously compromised username/password combinations.
  • Card fraud bots that rapidly enter possible gift card numbers in hopes of stealing gift card balances.
  • Influence fraud bots that flood a site with fake votes, reviews, comments, or media selections to create the appearance of popularity.

Security leaders working to stop bad bots can’t create a bot management program in isolation. Recruit colleagues in your marketing, e-commerce, and customer experience departments to help determine what parts of the customer lifecycle are most at risk and how best to protect them. Remember, they likely have an incredibly high stake in making sure that customer traffic is legitimate and tracked as accurately as possible. Monitor reports as a group, and maintain an environment of clean web traffic with constant diligence. For more information, check out our updated report, Stop Bad Bots From Killing Customer Experience, and set up an inquiry to discuss further.