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I am working on an e-commerce website... there is a bot that keeps creating new users on our website... All the users belong to allmelbet.com and all of them have exactly the same first name and last name:

Williamemink WilliameminkQK

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The signup process to the our website is quite standard... they can either create an account with Facebook/Google or they need to enter an email address and click on the confirmation link send to their email... all of these suspicious accounts are created using the latter option.

I don't understand why they are creating so many accounts... if they were interested in scraping the website data, they did not need to create an account... creating account is a requirement when someone wants to list (sell) something on the e-commerce website... these users have not created any listing (so far)...

Questions:

  1. Has anyone experienced this? Is this a known attack? Or just a scrapping bot, who would create a new account before scraping?

  2. How can I prevent this? Is there a built-in mechanism in AWS Shield to block this domain?

Hooman Bahreini
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  1. Yes this is a pretty standard attack that happens to many ecommerce sites. I believe the main goal in this case is to send spam emails to the addresses specified (because you will send a "please confirm your email address" to all of them). This will be bad for your reputation (e.g. if you use AWS Simple Email Service you will run into trouble at some point, or your mail server will be blacklistet etc.)

  2. The most commonly used mechanic to prevent things like this is to use a captcha. There is no simple "switch this on" method because it needs to be integrated into your software, e.g. evaluate email addresses specified in order to classify as spam or ham.

rauberdaniel
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