The Q2 Arkose Labs Fraud and Abuse Report informs that the bot attacks consisted mainly of spam, info scraping, in-game abuse, inventory hoarding, and API abuse. Furthermore, a 28% increase in payments attacks was also registered in the same period.
According to the company, Europe was the top attacking geography, with more than one-third of all attacks originating there. Additionally, there was a significant number of human-driven attacks originating from North America.
2021 started off with heightened attack volumes carrying over from the end of 2020. However, by the midpoint of Q1 there was a drop off in attacks in most industries, except for technology and media/streaming, which continued to see high fraud levels.
At its peak, the Arkose Labs Network detected five million attacks daily during the first half of Q1. The overall attack rate dropped significantly as the quarter went on, from a peak of more than 30% of sessions being identified as malicious to 17%. This was due to a respite from large scale, targeted bot attacks. Human-driven fraud however did increase slightly this quarter. Additionally, fraud originating from mobile devices also increased from 16.2% in Q4 2020 to 28% in Q1 2021.
The company informed that the Q2 Arkose Labs Fraud and Abuse Report is based on actual user sessions and attack patterns that were analysed by the Arkose Labs Fraud and Abuse Prevention Platform from January through March 2021. These sessions, spanning account registrations, logins, and payments from financial services, ecommerce, travel, social media, gaming, and entertainment were analysed in real-time to provide insights into the evolving fraud and risk landscape. Unsophisticated bot attacks do not result in a user session and thus have not been included in this report. The report focuses on attacks from fraud outlets that combine state-of-the-art technology with stolen identity credentials and human efforts.
