Fake sign up  is a serious problem for digital businesses. It can affect deliverability rates, skew audience data and cost businesses a lot of money.

It happens when bad actors use bots to fill out forms on your website with fake information, and it is a growing problem for many e-commerce platforms and other online services. They may do this for a number of reasons, from obtaining freebies and stealing user data to damaging your reputation and hurting business operations.

Seeds of Success: Strategies for Secure and Efficient New Account Origination

Most digital businesses request only a few pieces of personal information when new users register, such as a name and email address, which makes it easy for bad actors to create fake account registrations. This leniency is often exploited by spambots that are programmed to look for specific code and then fill out the form with fake information.

A sign that your audience data is skewed by fake sign up is when the first and last names provided don’t match the email address. Another sign is when there are many sign ups from a single geographic location all of a sudden, as this could be a spambot attack.

To protect your business against fake sign up, there are a few techniques you can use, such as rate limiting. This method prevents too many form submissions from a single IP address or device in a short period of time and is effective at blocking spambots. You can also implement a honey pot field, which is a hidden field that will only show up when the spambot fills out the form, letting you know it’s an attempted scam.

Detecting VPNs

A VPN detection is a service that allows you to hide your IP address and web traffic from a variety of sources, including government agencies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). You can also use a VPN to connect to a private network, such as a company’s intranet or a secure wireless access point.

Websites and streaming services often employ tools that are designed to detect VPNs. They need to do this to prevent users from bypassing geo-blocks and other content restrictions. They also need to comply with licensing and copyright laws that limit where their content can be viewed.

VPN detection is a serious problem, as websites and other entities can learn your identity, location, and web activity. For example, a streaming site can look up your public IP address to see whether it matches any of the country-specific addresses they’ve compiled.

The Importance of VPN Detection: Protecting Your Website from Cyber Threats

The sites can do this because they have to refresh their IP pools periodically – that means renting new servers from data centers. This can be a costly operation, so many websites and streaming services simply don’t bother with it.

Fortunately, there are some solutions that can make this problem go away. These include a variety of detection methods, such as money trails, IP address monitoring, and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).

A malicious IP address appears to be a harmless string of numbers, but it can actually reveal valuable information about your device and location. Attackers use this to target you with malware, phishing attacks or scams. The IP can also serve as a channel to the attacker’s command-and-control server.

Malicious IPs aren’t always blacklisted, which makes it difficult for firewalls and other cybersecurity solutions to block them effectively. Some of the challenges include:

Often, malicious IP addresses have low popularity – meaning they don’t get much traffic compared to well-known IPs. As such, they tend to blend in with legitimate sources and may be ignored by security tools.

Malicious IP Address Lookup: Protecting Your Network from Threats

Another challenge is detecting suspicious activity from dynamic IPs that change periodically. This can be due to a lack of visibility on the cloud or when an IT department changes an employee’s assigned IP address.

To solve this challenge, it’s essential to incorporate tracking and multiple threat intelligence sources when assessing an IP’s reputation. Additionally, analyzing the DNS lookup name and destination port can provide valuable insights into the IP’s behavior. For example, an empty DNS name or the use of destination ports commonly used for phishing or spam can flag a malicious IP.

Using machine learning to identify malicious or suspicious IPs helps to fortify networks and systems against threats. For example, Voros’ research on Sophos AI visualized clusters of malicious activity across the IP space based on physical infrastructure, which allowed for detection of never-before-seen IPs.