How Attacks Evolve from Bots to Fraud - Part 1
Bot Basics A bot is a software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. Bots typically imitate or replace human user behavior because they operate much faster than human users. Good Bots make the Internet work - From search engine crawlers that bring the world to your fingertips to chatbots that engage and enhance the user experience. How Do Bots Facilitate Fraud? Bots can also be used to scale automated attacks which can result in account takeover (ATO) and fraud. Motivated cyber criminals leverage a sophisticated arsenal of bots, automation, and evasion techniques. They also perform ongoing reconnaissance to identify security countermeasures and constantly retool their attacks to evade detection. Automated Bot Attack Vector Examples... Credential Stuffing Automated Account Creation Content Scraping High Value Data Credit Application Fraud Gift Card Cracking Application DDoS Aggregator Threats Fake Account Creation Inventory Hoarding Bypass Auth reCAPTCHA The list goes on... Business Impact of Bad Bots Infrastructure Costs - Infrastructure needs to scale to deal with unwanted and/or undetected bot traffic Competitive Intelligence - Web scrapers collect important data to help competitors adjust their pricing strategies Wrong Business Decisions - Bot traffic distorts web site analytics which could lead to making wrong business decisions Sneaker Bots - Bots are buying limited editions of certain products before regular buyers and then sell on black market Account Take-over - Credential stuffing leveraging stolen accounts purchased on the Darkweb providing access Fraudulent Transactions - Fraudulent transactions with large financial consequences as a result of account take-over in the finance sector The Industrialized (organized) Attack Lifecycle Figure 1. It begins with unwanted automation and ends with account takeover and application fraud What are Credential Spills? Credential Spill - A cyber incident in which a combination of username and/or email and password pairs becomes compromised. Date of Announcement - The first time a credential spill becomes public knowledge. This announcement could occur in one of two ways: A breached organization alerts its users and/or the general public A security researcher or reporter discovers a credential spill and breaks the news Date of Discovery - When an organization first learned of its credential spill. Organizations are not always willing to share this information. Stolen Credentials - Criminal Usage by Stage Stage 1: Slow and Quiet Sophisticated threat actors operating in stealth mode - 150 to - 30 days before the public announcement Each credential used (on average) 20 times per day Figure 2. Slow and quiet stage. Attackers use credentials in stealth mode from 150 to 30 days before the public announcement Stage 2: Ramp Up Creds become available on Darknet around ~30 days before public announcement Use of creds ramp up to 70 times per day Figure 3. The ramp-up stage. Attackers ramp up use of compromised credentials 30 days before the public announcement. Stage 3: The Blitz Credentials become public knowledge Script Kiddies + N00bs The first week is absolute chaos - each account attacked > 130 times per day Figure 4. The blitz stage. Script kiddies and other amateurs race to use credentials after the public announcement. Stage 4: Drop-Off / New Equilibrium Creds *should* be worthless at this point... Consumer reuse and lack of change allows for attacker "repackaging" and long tail value Figure 5. The drop-off stage. Credentials no longer have premium value Network Traffic Automation The simplest level of user simulation contains tools that make no attempt toemulate human behavior orhigher levelbrowser activity. They simply craftHTTP requests along specified parameters and pass them along to the target.These are the simplest, cheapest, and fastest tools.Sentry MBAis perhaps thestandard tool of this type. Figure 6. Sentry MBA, a standard user simulation tool Browser and Native App Automation Most of the websites that we interact with every day—online banking, ecommerce, and travel sites—consist of large web applications built on hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript. These webpages are not simple documents, so simulating convincing transactions at the network level is extremely complex. At this point, it makes more sense for an attacker to automate activity at the browser level. Until 2017, PhantomJS was the most popular automated browser in the market. When Google released Chrome 59 that year, however, it pushed forward the state of browser automation by exposing a programmatically controllable “headless” mode (that is, absent a graphical user interface) for the world's most popular browser, Chrome. This gave attackers the ability to quickly debug and troubleshoot their programs using the normal Chrome interface while scaling their attacks. Furthermore, just weeks after this announcement, Google developers released Puppeteer, a cross-platform Node.js library that offers intuitive APIs to drive Chrome-like and Firefox browsers. Puppeteer has since become the go-to solution for browser automation, as you can see from its growing popularity in web searches. Figure 7. Google trends graph showing interest in PhantomJS versus Puppeteer between 2010 and 2016. (Source: Google Trends) Simulating Human Behavior The next level of sophistication above simulating a browser is simulating human behavior. It's easy to detect rapid, abrupt mouse movements and repeated clicks at the same page coordinates (such as a Submit button), but it is much harder to detect behavior that includes natural motion and bounded randomness. While Puppeteer and the Chrome DevTools Protocol can generate trusted browser events, such as clicks or mouse movements, they have no embedded functionality to simulate human behavior. Even if perfect human behavior was as simple as including a plug-in, Puppeteer is still a developer-oriented tool that requires coding skill. Enter Browser Automation Studio, or BAS. BAS is a free, Windows-only automation environment that allows users to drag and drop their way to a fully automated browser, no coding needed. Figure 8. Browser Automation Studio User Interface Scaling Up Real Human Behavior As attackers grow in capability, they succeed in creating automated attacks that look more like human behavior. In some contexts, it actually makes more sense to just use actual humans. "Microwork" is a booming industry in which anyone can farm out small tasks in return for pennies. These services describe their jobs as ideal for labeling data destined for machine learning systems and, in theory, that would be a perfect use. In reality, the tasks the human workers perform are helping bypass antibot defenses on social networks, retailers, and any site with a login or sign-up form. Figure 9. Data labeling “microwork” using humans to help bypass antibot defenses In Conclusion Depending on the attacker sophistication level and motivation there are a variety of tools ranging from basic automation to leveraging real humans to attempt to bypass bot defenses and perform account takeover actions. No matter the skill level, most attackers (at least, most cybercriminals) will start off with the cheapest, that is, least sophisticated, attacks in order to maximize rate of return. Able attackers will only increase sophistication (and thereby cost) if their target has implemented countermeasures that detect their original attack, and if the rewards still outweigh that increased cost. Related Content: Deploy Bot Defense on any Edge with F5 Distributed Cloud (SaaS Console, Automation) How Attacks Evolve From Bots to Fraud - Part 2 F5 Labs 2021 Credential Stuffing Report
F5 Bot Defense for Salesforce Commerce Cloud – Protect Your E-Commerce Site From Unwanted Bots and Illegitimate Traffic (1 of 2)
This article is the first in a two-part series. Go to Part 2 here. Introduction Effective security matters to every retailer of every size because attacks continue to increase, whether engineered by humans or automated by bots. To help all our e-commerce customers succeed, F5 has made security easy to adopt and offers a wide range of integrations, including with cloud-based commerce platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC). F5 Bot Defense integrates directly into the SFCC storefront and protects your digital business against unwanted bots and illegitimate traffic. Website owners and developers can gain full visibility, protect against credential stuffing, fraud & abuse attacks, and other advanced attacks that bypass traditional security controls. In this article, you will learn how to configure and customize the F5 Bot Defense solution for your SFCC site. The solution is delivered as a certified cartridge and supports both the legacy Site Genesis Salesforce Commerce Cloud eCommerce sites and the modern Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) sites. Note: This article contains a fair number of references to Shape Security-related offerings including Shape Enterprise Defense. Shape Security was acquired by F5 in 2020 and many of the products and offerings are currently undergoing a rebranding effort. During a period of time, you will continue to see the Shape branding reflected in the user interface, some settings, and occasionally in product references. Figure 1: F5 Bot Defense for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Deployment Steps The F5 cartridge can be deployed with either Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA), a controller-based SiteGenesis site, or a pipeline-based SiteGenesis site. The deployment steps outlined below were tested for Salesforce B2C Version 21.7, Compatibility mode 21.2, and SFRA version 6.0.0. Prerequisites F5 Bot Defense requires an API key and a header prefix string for your e-commerce website to connect to the backend engine. Please contact your F5 account team or F5 customer services for any help in obtaining the API key and the prefix string. Step 1: Install the F5 Cartridge and Import the Metadata Firstly, you will install the F5 Cartridge and set up the business manager, for integrating F5 Bot Defense with SFCC. Download and Install the F5 Bot Defense Cartridge Deploy the F5 Bot Defense cartridge using Salesforce UX Studio for Eclipse. Alternatively, you can use Visual Studio code with the Prophet Debugger extension. Download the F5 cartridge from the SFCC LINK Marketplace by clicking on the Download Integration button. Establish a new digital server connection with your SFCC instance. Import cartridges to the workspace in Salesforce UX Studio. Figure 2: F5 Bot Defense cartridge imported into the workspace within Salesforce UX Studio Add the cartridge to the Project Reference of Server Connection. Figure 3: F5 Bot Defense cartridge added to the Project Reference of Server Connection Wait until the Studio completes the workspace build and uploads source codes to the sandbox. Assign the F5 Bot Defense Cartridge to the Storefront Site In the SFCC Business Manager portal, navigate to Administration > Sites > Manage Sites. On the Storefront Sites webpage, click on your site name. Next, click on the Settings tab on the site webpage. At the beginning of the cartridge path, add the following: int_f5:int_f5_sfra: When done, press the Apply button. Figure 4: F5 Bot Defense cartridge path added to the Storefront site Import the Metadata To add the newly configured setting to the Storefront site, you will need to import the pre-defined metadata: Open the downloaded cartridge package and navigate to the /metadata/f-five folder. Click on the Sites folder and rename the RefArch folder to the ID of your storefront site specified in the Business Manager. Then, zip the f-five folder. Navigate to Administration > Site Development > Site Import & Export. Under the Upload Archive section, upload the f-five.zip file and click on the Import button. Figure 5: Import the pre-defined metadata for the site using the ‘Site Import & Export’ feature Continue reading Part 2 here.How Attacks Evolve From Bots to Fraud - Part 2
In our previous article we discussed how an attackers sophistication evolves in order to bypass anti-automation countermeasures and achieve their actions on the target. In this article and video we walk through some specific automated attack tools and test them against a real endpoint protected by F5 Bot Defense to get a real look at this scenario. When it comes to an attacker being successful with their automation toolkit, it heavily depends on the Anti-Automation solution that is protecteing the web property they are attacking and the sophistication of the attacker. In order to bypass any countermeasures the attacker must make the attack look as human as possible. Let's briefly discuss the different tools we'll be using in our demo starting with low sophistication and ending with a higher sophistication attack. Low sophistication Attacks (e.g. CURL): for run in {1..10} do curl -s 'https://credstuff.acmecorp.com/user/signin' -i -X POST -d "username=1&password=1" > /dev/null echo echo CURL Credential Stuffing attempt $run done sleep 2 done Sample: CURL Script performing basic credential stuffing HTTP POST example CURL is a tool that almost everyone uses these days to transfer data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP). The command is designed to work without user interaction so of course it lends itself well to automation both good and bad. CURL offers a busload of useful tricks like proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer resume, Metalink, and more. The number of features will make your head spin but it can also facilitate malicious activity and potentially fool origin servers that don't have proper checks in place. CURL can be used to generate automated credential stuffing attacks do to the massive amount of features CURL can generate much of the network traffic, headers, user agents strings and such that a real browser would. This can be used to fool origin servers into thinking it is a real browser and not an automated login attempt. Medium sophistication (e.g. Open Bullet 2) OpenBullet 2 is a cross platform automation suite powered by .NET core. It allows users to perform requests towards a target webapp and offers a lot of tools to work with the results. This software can be used for scraping and parsing data, automated pentesting and much more. This tool can also be used maliciously by attackers for Credential Stuffing and other automated web threats. It allows the user to import proxy lists, build automated attack configurations, leverage third party CAPTCHA solvers, and much more. High sophistication (e.g. Selenium with Python) from selenium import webdriver from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys driver = webdriver.Firefox() driver.get("http://www.python.org") assert "Python" in driver.title elem = driver.find_element_by_name("q") elem.clear() elem.send_keys("pycon") elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN) assert "No results found." not in driver.page_source driver.close() Sample: Selenium Python Script performing basic browser automation function Selenium is an umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries that enable and support the automation of web browsers. Selenium supports automation of all the major browsers in the market through the use of WebDriver. WebDriver is an API and protocol that defines a language-neutral interface for controlling the behaviour of web browsers. With this ability to automate Web Browsers through the use of scripting can also lend itself to enabling an attacker to attempt to bypass many anti-automation solutions for a variety of different attacks. OWASP has defined a list of many of the different Automated Threats here... Learn more about the Selenium Browser Automation Project here Video Description: Automated attack tools are evolving quickly. Increasing scale, sophistication, and human emulation gives threat actors better chances of bypassing existing Bot Defense countermeasures leading to Account Takeover and Fraud. In this session we'll demonstrate how attacks evolve from bots to fraud. Hope you guys enjoyed this Overview and Demo. If there are any comments or questions please feel free to reach us in the comments section. Thanks! Related Content: Deploy Bot Defense on any Edge with F5 Distributed Cloud (SaaS Console, Automation) How Attacks Evolve From Bots to Fraud Part: 1 F5 Bot Management
F5 Bot Defense for Salesforce Commerce Cloud – Protect Your E-Commerce Site From Unwanted Bots and Illegitimate Traffic (2 of 2)
This article is the second in a two-part series. Go to Part 1 here. Step 2: Setup the Integration You will identify the endpoints and customize several settings in the F5 cartridge. Custom Objects The integration uses custom objects to configure endpoints that should be protected. Custom objects are stored locally (per Site). Navigate to Merchant Tools > Custom Objects > Manage Custom Objects There are three custom object types. BotProtectedEndpoints - describes the protected endpoint behavior SAFEEndpoints - describes the protected endpoint behavior for SAFE mode GETScrapingEndpoints - describes the protected endpoint behavior ISTL BotProtectedEndpoints and GETScrapingEndpoints have the same structure. SAFEEndpoints have only ‘id’ and ‘paths’ fields. The custom object stores a list of all protected endpoints and describes their behavior for different F5 Shape solutions. The example below outlines how to configure the account-login-post object as a protected endpoint. Select the object type based on the subscribed mode and click on the Find button. In the results, click on the account-login-post object id and select a Mitigation Action. Figure 6: Sample configuration to define a protected endpoint Custom Site Preference Groups. Here, you will specify the values of various options to customize the F5 integration. Navigate to Merchant Tools > Custom Site Preferences Groups > Site Preferences > Custom Preferences and click on Shape. Enter the values for Telemetry Header Prefix, F5 Shape API hostname, and API key, obtained from F5. Figure 7: Sample configuration to specify the values for connecting to the F5 Bot Defense back-end engine Scroll down to Specify F5 Shape JS URL or Path. Enter the JS URL. In the Select location for JS tag(s) option, you will choose one of the following, based on your preferred location to insert the JS tag: After head (head) After tail (tail) Before script (script) Figure 8: Sample configuration to specify the values for F5 Shape JS URL and its path In the Insert JS tag(s) in only specific web pages (entry pages) option, select either Yes/ No. The No choice will insert the JS tag to all the webpages The Yes choice will provide an additional option to specify the web pages for which the JS tag needs to be inserted. Figure 9: Sample configuration to assign the JS tag to specific entry pages This completes the F5 cartridge configuration. When done, click on the Save button at the top right-hand cover of the web page. Step 3: Verification To test the F5 Bot Defense integration with SFCC, emulate a malicious request from a client machine to your e-commerce website. From Browser Access and log in to your SFCC site from the browser. Inspect the web page source; you will notice the JS inserted by the SFCC. Figure 10: JS insertion You will also notice the prefix string and the telemetry headers passed in the HTTP POST. Figure 11: Telemetry headers inserted in the HTTP POST Now, disable the JavaScript support in the setting of the client browser and log in to your site. The F5 Bot Defense will identify this HTTP request as malicious web traffic and will block the request ('Block' is the migration action selected for the account-login-post in the custom objects) Figure 12: F5 Bot Defense blocked the request from the JS disabled browser F5 Bot Protection Manager Access your F5 Bot Protection Manager portal to see all the client requests to your e-commerce site. You will notice all the shoppers' traffic to the storefront, the login request from the JavaScript disabled browser that was used to emulate bot traffic will be flagged by F5 Bot Defense in red as malicious. Figure 13: Malicious bot traffic detection by F5 Bot Defense The F5 Bot Defense integration with SFCC using the certified cartridge is an easy-to-deploy solution that seamlessly works with the Storefront Reference Architecture. With this industry-leading MI-driven security, your digital business is safeguarded in real-time with superior accuracy & long-term efficacy. Deploy the cartridge from the SFCC Link Marketplace to minimize the impact of Bots on your business, confidently. Additional Resources F5 Bot Defense integration for SFRA sites: Configuration Guide F5 Bot Defense integration for SiteGenesis sites: Configuration Guide Solution Lightboard: YouTube Video Salesforce partnership: Technology Alliance on F5.com
