6th January 2025
Imagine incurring $500,000 – $1 million monthly for API requests by a third-party vendor. This can occur when bots relentlessly scrape flight information, significantly inflating API usage costs.
While financial losses are substantial, the impact of bad bot traffic extends beyond monetary damage.
A sudden deviation in the look-to-book ratio can indicate illegal scraping by bots, tampering with business metrics and insights. This distorted data hinders accurate market analysis and can lead to misguided business decisions.
Furthermore, unauthorised scraping raises legal and ethical concerns, potentially violating data privacy regulations.
Beyond financial losses and data distortion, bot activity poses significant security risks. Bots can facilitate identity theft and be leveraged for launching Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, crippling online operations. The most sophisticated bots mimic human user behaviour with remarkable accuracy, evading traditional security measures. These bots, often enabled by “Bots-as-a-Service” platforms, utilise high-quality proxies, machine learning, and other advanced techniques such as price scraping, scalping and seat spinning, credential stuffing and cracking, and Layer 7 DDoS to seamlessly integrate into legitimate user traffic.
Key questions for airlines to explore in 2025 include:
- How to effectively combat bot-driven attacks, including sophisticated account takeover attempts?
- How to optimise the integration of bot managers with content delivery networks and web application firewalls?
- How to address the complexities of legacy systems in implementing robust bot mitigation strategies?
- Why is multi-factor authentication alone insufficient in preventing bot attacks, and what alternative or supplementary measures should be considered?
Join experts at the #ATPS2025 in the UK this year. Stay tuned for more details!
By Ritesh Gupta, Ai Events
