Credential Stuffing: Prevention & Best Practices for Defense

Last Updated: July 31, 2023 by Florian Tanant
User activity monitoring sounds straightforward – until you begin digging into its many uses.
Let’s do just that, making things as easy to follow as we can, with a specific focus on how to improve it in the context of risk management.
User activity monitoring (UAM), also known as user access monitoring, refers to frameworks set in place to log and track user actions on devices, networks, or websites. Note that the term user may refer to customers, visitors, or even company employees.
The goal of UAM is to analyze data about how users are interacting with a website, app, or other digital product and develop useful insights about that data. It can be used to segment customer bases, improve the efficiency of all kinds of internal business practices, and, especially, reduce risk in the context of cybersecurity, fraud detection, and IT security.
This kind of data is crucial internally to optimize workflows and improve ROI for various sales and marketing functions, as well as to improve overall customer experiences. Even more importantly, that same ROI can be preserved from financial and reputational damage when it is turned onto fraudsters, detecting them before they can be an issue by identifying patterns of malicious behavior, regardless of whether the fraud threat is internal or external.
Learn how an iGaming company automated risk reviews with SEON to free up 40% more resources.
Read the Case Study
User activity monitoring works by gathering user activity data on a website, server, device, or app. The data is labeled and sorted in order to be interpreted by organizations, either for marketing, security, or productivity purposes.
For user activity monitoring to work, a company must deploy specific tools that are either built-in, developed in-house, or purchased and integrated, usually via a SaaS model.
Some user activity monitoring solutions focus on recording key actions (such as clicking on buttons or opening web links), while other tools offer more sophisticated session recordings, capturing every action in video form.
The B2B market is abundant with tools and features designed to capture as much valuable user data as possible. A non-exhaustive list of these include:
However, collecting every data point isn’t always efficient. Depending on your user activity monitoring strategy, it’s much more effective to focus on specific data points rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach or getting lost in endless data.
These days, most software comes with user logging, so you have full visibility of which user has done what and can both monitor suspicious activity and dig into what happened if something went wrong. That is a start – but for many use cases, you would want to capture even more.
Wherever there are people, there is both profit and risk. Though UAM can be used to guardrail ROI and create user experiences that may result in a growing user base, its uses for fraud prevention are better for the solvency of any company in the long-term. Without good data and monitoring practices, fraud will inevitably become a problem that could snowball into more than just lost money or product, but also legal woes and massive fines.
More specifically, here are 5 reasons that UAM should be a priority for any company operating in any digital sphere:
One of the key reasons to monitor users is to secure a company’s data, both physically (IT security) and digitally (cybersecurity). In 2022, the average cost of a data breach reached a record $3.86 million, according to IBM.
Regardless of whether the warning signs exist inside internal SQL databases, OS, or other administrative commands, malicious patterns associated with potential data breaches can be detected when a comprehensive UAM platform is implemented. This is true no matter if the patterns originate from customers, employees, or executives. Any kind of unwanted change will be logged – and potentially blocked depending on its severity.
Ensuring compliance is a growing reason to deploy user activity monitoring software.
Compliance monitoring, for instance, is a regulatory requirement for companies in the context of KYC and AML. It also involves looking at user data and behavior. In this example, the relevant data must also be logged when submitting a suspicious activity report, aka SAR.
Here, again, the goal is to reduce risk. Namely, the risk of having to pay a heavy compliance fine by allowing identity thieves and money launderers to interact with your business.
Web analytics are a major part of user activity monitoring. Marketing teams will certainly use user activity monitoring services and web analytics to improve website experiences and, ultimately, the road to checkout. However, any marketing team employing affiliate programs like pay-per-click should also be using that data to catch fraudulent affiliates.
A particular problem for companies large enough to have automated affiliate onboarding systems in place, there are plenty of shady online outfits that exist purely to take advantage of various PPC marketing campaigns. PPC affiliates can collect a premium for directing traffic to a website offering such a campaign. UAM can help detect fraudulent affiliates directing either bot traffic to partner sites and then collecting the payout for the apparently legit traffic. In other cases, fraudsters mislead real people to the site through pop-ups, layered links, or other malicious online practices – naturally, these rarely lead to a sale.
User monitoring is a core feature of fraud prevention. You want to be able to separate legitimate customers from fraudsters. This involves collecting data relating to the following:
The kind of user activity monitoring features you need for fraud prevention varies depending on your business model – which is why we strongly recommend going through our risk assessment checklist to get started.
Partner with SEON to reduce fraud rates in your business with real-time data enrichment, whitebox machine learning, and advanced APIs.
Ask an Expert
Another important aspect of fraud prevention is the ability to detect when a user is exhibiting behavior that is less like a real person and more like an automated bot – a sadly common tool of many fraudsters.UAM is overwhelmingly important when it comes to bot detection. Of course, bots interact with apps and websites very differently from humans, and since many fraudsters use bots at scale, with dozens or even thousands of bots, these interactions are repeated and thus easier to flag as bad traffic. Users that repeat the exact same usage pattern, move at inhuman speeds, or attempt to shove themselves through a single gateway at once for attacks like credential stuffing are easily detected with UAM – indeed, this is one of the primary functions of a strong user activity monitoring system.
While every company can benefit from user activity monitoring, it can also be seen as a controversial practice, especially for users who value their privacy. This is why it is important to respect the best practices.
Finally, it’s also worth considering how you choose your user activity monitoring solution, as multiple user activity monitoring tools can be combined into one. For instance, marketing analytics and fraud prevention software for user activity monitoring may have overlapping features.
SEON is a complete full user activity monitoring software designed to work in the context of risk management and fraud prevention. It works in three steps: capturing user data, enriching it to complete the picture, and feeding the data through risk rules. This process helps you measure how risky user actions are in order to:
A key benefit of the SEON platform is the ability to use velocity rules, which look at user data actions within a specific timeframe. For instance, multiple login attempts, or a suspiciously high number of password resets can be flagged for review by your risk team.
Whether you need the risk in the context of compliance, fraud attacks, or even stolen user accounts, SEON has got you covered.
Most companies rely on user activity monitoring software, which logs and records user data. The features may include keylogging, video recordings, or data logs.
User activity includes any kind of interaction on your server, system, app, or website. This may be a transaction, a signup, a login, or even browsing and filling out a form.
User activity monitoring looks at all kinds of user actions, while user access monitoring tends to only focus on access permissions. However, both terms are increasingly used interchangeably, and both are often shortened to UAM.
Not so. In fact, the GDPR specifically states that user monitoring is legal when necessary for the purpose of preventing fraud and for targeted marketing.
“The processing of personal data strictly necessary for the purposes of preventing fraud also constitutes a legitimate interest of the data controller concerned. The processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest.”
Recital 47
Sources
Showing all with `` tag
Click here
Communication Specialist | Florian helps tech startups and global leaders organise their thoughts, find their voices, and connect with customers worldwide.
The top stories of the month delivered straight to your inbox