For a long time, I underestimated retail bots, seeing them as unsophisticated operators cobbling together basic tools. But after in-depth research and hundreds of hours inside botting communities, I’ve realized operators are far more advanced.
Bots are no longer simple scripts; they’re often built by small, agile teams of software developers using advanced methodologies. They can mimic human behavior so closely that they evade many traditional detection systems, rendering anti-bot and anti-scraping measures ineffective. That means the data you collect through customer-experience platforms — data you rely on for marketing, engagement, and business intelligence — can be corrupted with false signals. The stakes rose further with AI, which lets operators move faster, orchestrate thousands of resources, and defeat controls at companies of all sizes.
Why should you care?
In short, we’re seeing a greater influx of bad data and potentially larger security issues. When AI-powered bots interact with your website, they can generate activity that looks like legitimate user behavior and then suddenly drop off. That skews your analytics and leads you down false paths — like believing you have a software issue when it’s really bot traffic distorting your data. False data misinforms strategic decisions, wastes resources, and impacts revenue.
But it’s not just noise. Retail botting methodologies often mirror those used by more malicious actors — for example, account-creation attacks in which thousands of accounts are generated and controls like SMS verification are defeated to complete the process.
So, what do we do?
Companies need a defense-in-depth strategy; no single-point solution addresses every challenge in defending against AI-powered bots. As a starting point, security, product, and e-commerce teams need to understand what they’re up against. Specifically, they need to become acquainted with the bot operators’ tech stack — the community, technology, and tools used in retail botting.
In this series, we explore eight key areas of that stack, with a high-level overview before diving deeper into each:
- Cook Groups — subscription communities where operators organize, learn, research upcoming opportunities, buy discounted software, run monitors, and learn from each other’s successes and failures.
- Proxies — essential for anonymizing traffic, generating thousands of unique sessions, rotating on blocks, and evading defenses.
- Botting Software — subscription SaaS built by small, agile teams and constantly updated to bypass security defenses more efficiently.
- Account Creation — tools to generate, or buy, thousands of legitimate-looking accounts that stay undetected until they’re needed.
- SMS Defeat Tools — automated responses to SMS challenges, using thousands of low-cost phone numbers for bulk verification.
- Activity Farming — AI techniques that mimic human browsing to make bot-generated accounts look legitimate.
- Virtual Credit Cards — disposable, merchant-specific cards generated in bulk and rotated to maintain anonymity.
- Bot Management Defeat — strategies for circumventing bot-management solutions, not just CAPTCHA defeat.
We’ll explore each area in the coming weeks. First up, a closer look at Cook Groups and how botters organize online.