AML & KYC for iGaming: Staying Compliant and Safe

by Gergo Varga
If your business is under attack from multiple users who all perform the same task, bots are likely to be involved. Bot attacks take on many forms, such as DDoS attacks or multi-accounting. Detecting bots can help reduce fraud, lower chargeback rates and save on cybersecurity costs – as well as protect your user and employee accounts.
In this post, we’ll break down different bot attacks, why they target you, and, of course, how to protect yourself.
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Bot detection and mitigation software allow you to filter out legitimate traffic from bots. By extracting data relating to the connection type or device used, you can understand if it looks like humans or bots.
Regardless of your industry, it’s important to understand who your web visitors are. Bots, which are essentially scripts, or computer programs, aren’t always nefarious, but they can point to cybercrime and online fraud.
Bot detection techniques vary from one business to another, but there are a few recurring features, such as:
Disclaimer: Everything written about the companies mentioned in this article was gleaned from online research and user reviews. We did not manually test the tools. However, we ensured the information was correct as of Q1 2022. Feel free to get in touch to request an update or correction.
SEON is first and foremost a fraud detection software, but it’s easy to see how its features can work perfectly for bot detection. This is all thanks to its real-time monitoring, which allows risk teams to get a better live understanding of their website traffic, and a combination of powerful risk scoring.
Most of the heavy lifting for bot detection is done via two modules, IP analysis, and Device Fingerprinting. These tools allow you to understand how users connect to your site and to get an idea of their online behavior. This is the perfect way to answer questions such as:
With clear risk scores and dynamic friction, you get complete bot mitigation features to allow, decline or review bot traffic.
DataDome, which calls itself the #1 SaaS bot protection solution for e-commerce and classified ads businesses, offers dashboards and real-time alerting to keep an eye on your traffic.
You can of course adjust and filter actions to manually fight against bot activity, even allowing you to segment bots into good bots, bad bots, and monetization bots. In the bad bots section, the software will prevent DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and scraping.
DataDome is compatible with every web infrastructure technology, multi-cloud, and even multi CDN setups. At the time of writing, the company protects 10 000+ eCommerce and classified domains worldwide, including TripAdvisor, the New York Times, and BlaBlaCar.
When it comes to bot detection software, few companies can claim to be as confident as Arkose Labs. They even include a 100% bot detection guarantee as part of their service agreement.
The company says it can identify, block and monitor high-volume attacks, low and slow attacks, and even hybrid attacks that combine bots and human fraud farms to bypass your security checks. To do so, it doesn’t rely on static rules or even risk scoring, but rather real-time intelligence, rich analytics, and step-up challenges to eliminate the ROI of bot fraud.
As one of the biggest DNS (domain name systems) and CDN (content delivery network) operating on the Internet, Cloudflare needs little introduction these days.
What not many people realize, however, is that their service protects internet properties from malicious activity such as malicious bots and DDoS attacks.
If you’re already using Cloudflare (or are launching a new venture), it’s a very attractive proposition, as you can get affordable bot mitigation along with all the tools needed to make your website faster and more efficient.
The company provides both security and performance to around 25 Million Internet sites worldwide. Best of all, you can benefit from its DDoS attack mitigation tool as part of its free offer, which also includes DNS, CDN, and free automated SSL certificates.
When it comes to online advertising fraud, bots are one of the biggest headaches for marketers. How can they ensure they get the right result and discount abusive, disruptive, fraudulent, or wasteful clicks?
The answer comes courtesy of ClickGUARD, a solution designed to identify and block all types of unwanted clicks on your Google Ads campaigns. It’s ideal both for advertisers and agencies who need to make the best out of their Google Ads budgets or scale their services and tools for clients.
It might not be the most versatile bot detection software, but ClickGUARD integrates seamlessly with other marketing tools such as ClickFunnels, Hubspot, and even Shopify, Weebly, and Wix, so you can ensure you get the most from your marketing dollars.
Radware offers a complete suite of protection products, including advanced multi-cloud application delivery, public cloud protection, and DDoS protection for data centers. It’s a cybersecurity company that also deals with malware protection and specific attacks on IT systems.
The company also has a specific bot management solution, appropriately named Radware Bot Manager. It uses a detection engine that collects more than 250 parameters to “understand” traffic and detect bots in real-time.
As such, it is designed to mitigate account takeover (ATO), DDoS, API abuse, carding, scraping, ad fraud, and form spam. It is aimed at enterprise clients in eCommerce, media, fintech, and legal services.
Reblaze offers bot control as one of its many features, which also includes WAF (Web Application Firewall), API protection, CDN and load balancing, and even real-time traffic control for web developers.
It is a technical tool for clients with complex cybersecurity needs. The way it works is by controlling traffic in the cloud and filtering it there before it reaches the protected network.
With a latency of ~0.5 ms, their product is a fast, effective way to control incoming web traffic before allowing legitimate users on your site.
Bots are computer programs designed to run autonomously. More importantly, they can automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise take too much time to perform manually.
Whenever fraudsters or cybercriminals need to replicate the same actions hundreds, thousands, or millions of times, they rely on bots, or botnets (malware-infected computers linked together) to perform their dirty work.
According to the Spamhaus Project, India currently leads with the number of botnets (665710), closely followed by China and the US.
While there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to bot detection software, the key use cases will be to prevent the following attacks:
A DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service) attack is a malicious action that aims to disrupt a targeted website by overwhelming it.
It’s rarely possible to coordinate attacks on such a scale manually, which is why bots and botnets are employed to scale the number of actions until the server, service or network cannot deal with it any longer.
As reported by Corero, a single DDoS attack can cost a company up to $50,000 in lost revenue and 87% of queried companies expressed concern about this particular type of threat. It’s also worth noting that DDoS attacks have increased since IPv6 became a new Internet standard.
Phishing attacks are often launched with the purpose of extracting key information from an organization’s employees or users.
Spam campaigns and mass SMS campaigns, for instance, are only possible to automate with bots – as the manual workload would be too heavy for an attack with such a low success rate.
According to Comparitech, the industries most targeted by phishing attacks are SaaS and Webmail companies, closely followed by financial institutions and payment companies.
Brute force attacks are performed with software (bots) that go through entire lists of passwords to try to crack user login details. Sometimes the passwords are generated programmatically, other times they are taken from leaked databases (credential stuffing).
This is a growing concern as the amount of data leaked on darknet and clearnet websites shows no signs of slowing down. Every year brings a new record data breach, with billions of account details available online for fraudsters to exploit.
As more and more companies offer referral bonuses and promos for new signups, fraudsters use bots to automate the process and reap the rewards. It is damaging for your marketing, analytics, and could open the door to more fraud attacks in the future.
Here is an infographic explaining how bonus abuse works in iGaming, for instance.
Speaking of iGaming… Online gambling has some very specific bot problems, where criminals use software to automatically place bets and play certain games, such as online poker.
In 2020, for instance, a data leak exposed one of the biggest poker botnets rings ever identified after it played 60,000 sessions on 50 sites and earned up to $3M.
Events and ticketing companies have to control who buys the tickets. Fraudsters can use bots to automatically buy all of them before reselling them for a higher price (scalping).
This is terrible for your business reputation, which is why, in 2017, Ticketmaster, one of the largest online ticket sellers, filed a lawsuit against Prestige Entertainment for their continued use of scalper bots.
Any kind of peer-reviewed website can be targeted by bots for a variety of reasons. This damages your business reputation and can make life harder for legitimate visitors.
Scraping is the practice of automatically gathering data from other online sources. It’s a problem in online retail, for instance, where scraper bots automatically gather product prices before sending them to your competitors so that they may undercut you.
Any kind of marketing technique that relies on heavy traffic (pay per click, pay per lead, pay per impression) can be exploited if the traffic is made up of bots. Once again, this means your marketing spend isn’t going as far, and you have to deal with junk traffic, fraudulent affiliates, and potentially damaging business relationships.
You can read more about SEON and affiliate marketing fraud detection here.
Broadly speaking, there are three goals a good bot detection software should meet:
In cybersecurity, many botnet detection strategies revolve around data packet analysis, which can identify irregularities in data transmission to a server.
In fraud prevention and detection, a combination of risk rules will help highlight suspicious bot activity, which can then automatically be blocked or reviewed.
Bot detection software comes in many shapes and sizes. In fact, the biggest challenge when choosing the right tool is already having an understanding of the kind of attacks that target your company and what might crop up further down the line.
This is why it’s important to consider different tools based on your business goals. Whether you need a complete fraud prevention solution or something specific for Google Ads fraud and DDoS, we hope this guide will help you choose the best solution for your business.
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Frequently asked questions
The quality of your bot detection software depends on your risk factor. Some companies need bot detection software for their Google Ads campaigns, others to protect accounts from takeovers or from DDoS attacks.
Yes. Because they are programmed to perform the same actions repeatedly, it’s easy to analyze their activity and flag them as scripts or software.
Bot protection includes tools designed to let you monitor online traffic in order to identify and filter out malicious bots. This may include bots that perform DDoS attacks, ATO attacks, and malicious PPC clicks.
No. Search engines, for instance, use good bots called web crawlers or spiders. Similarly, you should ensure you allow copyright bots and site monitoring bots while filtering out those that may cause DDoS attacks or account takeovers.
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