Inventory Hoarding

How Inventory Hoarding Negatively Affects Enterprises

Inventory hoarding poses significant risks to businesses, with potentially adverse consequences for both consumers and the overall market. One of the key risks is the creation of artificial scarcity. By stockpiling excessive amounts of inventory, hoarders limit the supply of goods or resources, driving up prices and making products unaffordable for many consumers. This not only distorts market dynamics but also hampers fair market access, as genuine customers are deprived of the opportunity to purchase desired items.

Furthermore, inventory hoarding reduces consumer choice by limiting the variety of products available in the market. This lack of choice can frustrate consumers and hinder their ability to find the products they need or prefer. Hoarding practices also jeopardize the trust and reputation of businesses involved, leading to a negative perception of the brand and potential loss of loyal customers. Additionally, it can disrupt supply chains, straining inventory management, creating shortages, and causing inefficiencies in production and distribution.

Stop Denial of Inventory Attacks with Arkose Labs

Businesses use multiple techniques to protect against inventory hoarding, including the implementation of inventory management systems, establishing fair purchasing policies with quantity limits and collaborating with industry partners and regulatory authorities. But because virtually all of today’s digital attacks are automated, the most effective way to stop denial of inventory attacks is to implement an effective bot detection and mitigation system.

These tools utilize advanced techniques, such as machine learning, behavioral analytics, and real-time data analysis, to distinguish between human users and malicious bots. By accurately identifying and blocking bot activity, businesses can prevent bots from engaging in inventory hoarding. Businesses can also implement measures like CAPTCHAs, multi-factor authentication, and adaptive challenges to introduce friction and verification steps during the purchasing process. These additional authentication layers help ensure that real customers are accessing and purchasing inventory while making it more difficult for bots to automate the hoarding process.

Businesses can also continuously monitor website traffic, transaction patterns, and user behavior to identify suspicious activity indicative of bot-driven inventory hoarding. By closely analyzing this data and employing anomaly detection algorithms, businesses can detect and respond to bot-related hoarding attempts promptly.

• Device fingerprinting: By gathering device information through JavaScript, unique fingerprints are generated based on parameters like operating system, browser, language, and time zone. Detecting consistent parameter sets during consecutive logins can indicate inventory hoarding attacks.
• IP blacklisting: Attackers often rely on a limited number of IP addresses. By blocking IPs attempting to access multiple accounts, businesses can effectively discourage unauthorized access. Comparing the recent IP addresses used for specific accounts with suspicious IPs helps minimize false positives.
• Rate-limiting non-residential traffic sources: Bot traffic from commercial data centers is easily recognizable. Businesses can set strict rate limits and block or ban IPs that exhibit abnormal behavior, ensuring that inventory hoarding attempts are thwarted.

The most effective defense against inventory hoarding attacks is a comprehensive bot management solution, such as Arkose Labs. The solution incorporates device fingerprinting, IP reputation checks, behavior biometrics, and Arkose MatchKey Challenges—the strongest type of CAPTCHA on the market today. Arkose Labs' platform covers all consumer flows and dynamically responds to each attack pattern.

Real-Time Attack Detection

Stay ahead of evolving threats

In today's landscape, cybercriminals possess sophisticated tools to emulate genuine users and bypass security measures. Our comprehensive detection system analyzes real-time device, network, and behavioral signals throughout the customer workflow to uncover subtle indications of bot-driven and human-driven attacks, including device and location impersonation.

• Multi-layered detection using device, IP, and behavioral biometrics analysis
• Access to over 70 risk attributes to enhance existing models
• Machine learning decision-making based on 150+ global attack patterns
• 24/7 monitoring and analysis by our SOC team to identify and fine-tune threat responses

User-Focused Response to Attacks

Frustrate attackers, not users

Once suspicious activity is identified and traffic passes through Arkose MatchKey, any malicious intent is promptly recognized. Our tailored response mechanism enables genuine users to proceed seamlessly, while suspicious traffic encounters intricate puzzles that effectively halt bots and frustrate human cybercriminals.

• Resilient challenges designed to outsmart advanced bots
• Protection against attacks carried out by humans
• Optimized user experience surpassing traditional CAPTCHAs and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Continuous SOC monitoring with guaranteed mitigation service level agreement (SLA)