Similar to Credential Stuffing, in which passwords stolen from one site or service are used on another one, Carding uses stolen credit card information from one site or service to run an automated process to verify each card’s validity by charging small amounts on the checkout page or via the API of a different site.
Carding attacks are particularly insidious because they not only compromise the victim’s financial information but also impact businesses through fraudulent transactions. In these attacks, cybercriminals use automated bots to test stolen credit card details on various websites. They typically make small purchases or donations to verify the validity of the card information. Since these transactions are minor, they often go unnoticed by both the cardholder and the financial institutions, allowing attackers to confirm the card’s functionality without raising immediate alarms.
How Carding Works? From Verification to Exploitation
Carding is a systematic process cybercriminals use to verify the validity of stolen credit card numbers. It often starts with carders acquiring credit card numbers from dark web marketplaces. They then use automated bots to perform small transactions on various e-commerce sites. This step is crucial as it identifies active cards without triggering fraud alerts. Once confirmed as active, a card can be used for larger purchases or sold. This practice endangers consumers and imposes chargebacks and fines on merchants due to fraudulent transactions.
Advanced Evasion Techniques: How Carders Stay Under the Radar
Carders use sophisticated techniques to evade detection while exploiting stolen credit card data. One standard method involves using advanced bots to automate the testing of credit card numbers across various online platforms, ensuring quick and efficient validation. Carders often use proxy servers to hide their IP addresses and obscure their activities further, making their actions more challenging to trace. They also change device IDs and pace transactions to mimic genuine customer behavior, helping them bypass standard security measures. These methods allow carders to operate undetected for longer periods, increasing the risk and impact of their fraudulent activities.
The Impact of Carding on Businesses
Carding has a significant financial and operational impact on businesses. When fraudsters use stolen credit card information for purchases, merchants face chargebacks once the fraudulent transactions are identified. These chargebacks result in lost goods or services and incur administrative fees that can quickly accumulate, affecting the bottom line. Additionally, frequent instances of fraud can damage an organization’s reputation, potentially leading to higher processing fees or even termination of service by credit card processors. This situation underscores the necessity for robust fraud detection and prevention measures to protect both revenue and customer trust.
Tips for Preventing Carding Fraud
To mitigate the risks associated with carding, businesses can adopt various preventive measures and solutions:
- Robust Verification Tools: Implementing advanced verification tools such as CAPTCHA, two-factor authentication, and secure checkout processes can help in distinguishing legitimate users from automated bots.
- Transaction Velocity Checks: Monitoring the frequency and volume of transactions to identify and flag unusual activity patterns can prevent large-scale fraud.
- Advanced Fraud Detection Software: Using AI-driven fraud detection systems that analyze transaction data for signs of fraudulent activity can help in early identification and prevention.
- Network Security Enhancements: Strengthening network security with firewalls, encryption, and secure payment gateways protects sensitive customer data from being intercepted by hackers.
These strategies collectively help reduce the incidences of carding and safeguard organizations and their customers from potential financial losses and data breaches.
How CDNetworks Bot Shield Defends Against Carding Attacks
CDNetworks’ Bot Shield, a bot management solution, can help prevent carding attacks through various advanced techniques and technologies. Here’s how it can contribute to mitigating such fraudulent activities:
1. Advanced Bot Detection and Classification
- Behavioral Analysis: Bot Shield uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze the behavior of visitors on a website. This includes monitoring patterns such as the speed of form submissions, mouse movements, and keystrokes to distinguish between human users and automated bots.
- AI Detection: The solution employs machine learning models that are continuously trained to recognize new and evolving bot behaviors. This helps in accurately identifying malicious bots involved in carding attempts.
2. Real-Time Traffic Monitoring
- Anomaly Detection: By monitoring traffic in real-time, Bot Shield can detect anomalies that may indicate carding activities. For example, multiple small transactions or rapid-fire attempts to use different credit card numbers can be flagged as suspicious.
- Rate Limiting: Implementing rate limiting can prevent bots from making a large number of attempts in a short period, which is a common tactic in carding attacks. This limits the number of transactions that can be made from a single IP address or account within a specified time frame.
3. IP Reputation Management
- IP Blacklisting and Whitelisting: Bot Shield maintains a dynamic database of known malicious IP addresses. Requests from these IPs can be blocked automatically. Conversely, trusted IPs can be whitelisted to ensure legitimate traffic is not disrupted.
- Geolocation Filtering: Carding attacks often originate from regions different from where legitimate users are located. Geolocation filtering can block or challenge traffic from high-risk regions.
4. Fingerprinting and Identify Anomalous Traffic
- Fingerprinting: Bot Shield will assign a unique client ID to each browser by default and dynamically embed JS plugins into all html pages. Even if bots change IP addresses or use different accounts, their device fingerprint can be recognized and blocked.
- Identify Anomalous Traffic: Customize rules based on legitimate user behavior patterns to detect bot traffic that deviates from the norm.
5. CAPTCHA and Challenge Mechanisms
- Dynamic CAPTCHAs: To prevent automated carding attacks, Bot Shield can deploy CAPTCHAs that challenge suspicious traffic. These are effective in ensuring that the interactions are coming from human users rather than bots.
- Challenge-Response Tests: Besides CAPTCHAs, other challenges such as JavaScript computations or interactive puzzles can be used to verify the legitimacy of the user.
6. Continuous Learning and Adaptation
- Adaptive Defense: By using big data analysis and machine learning techniques to dynamically model access behavior, simple bots, complex bots, and advanced persistent threat bots (APBs) can be quickly discovered.
- Threat Intelligence: Leveraging CDNetworks’ global threat intelligence originates from real-time attack sample data on our platform, with a daily average of more than 3 billion attack samples, Bot Shield updates its risk IP intelligence based on the latest threat landscapes, ensuring up-to-date protection.
By combining these features, CDNetworks’ Bot Shield offers a comprehensive solution to detect, prevent, and mitigate carding attacks, protecting both the financial information of users and the integrity of online businesses.