Kicks & Chips: Deep Dive into Scalper Bots

Scalper bots are designed to automatically buy a large amount of an exclusive item such as tickets, sneakers, or GPUs, often to resell them for profit. In this episode, The Pivot host, Bradley Taylor sits down with Maltego Subject Matter Experts Mathieu Gaucheler and Threat Intelligence Analyst Liv Rowley to explore the following aspects of the scalper bot world: How scalper bots work Trends & details of the products targeted by scalper bots Pricing & plans of the bots on the market Ways the bots bypass counter-measures 0:00 Welcome! 0:33 Tell us about yourself! 1:29 What brought you to the scalper box? 3:21 How long do you think the scalper bots have been running? 4:50 Do you think the retailers are doing much to counter the scalper bots? 7:33 Is there any other method you think the retailers could use? 8:57 Are there specific platforms or applications the scalpers are using? 10:55 Is it illegal to run bots operations? 12:08 Could you tell us something interesting you found during the research? 17:00 Does it require a lot of knowledge to run bots applications and platforms? 19:28 What did you use and how did you start to do all these researches? 21:54 Do you think the sellers /users of these bots qualified as cyber criminal activity? 23:50 What were the odd things you saw bots targeting? 25:33 Has there been any specific activity in specific regions/platforms? 31:01 How are the bots bundle package priced? 32:40 How did you feel and what ran through your mind after the research? 35:05 What advice would you give to the new budding retailers? 38:41 Anything you would like to add? ■ About The Pivot Brought to you by Maltego, The Pivot deep dives into topics pivoting from information security to the criminal underground. Each episode features interviews with experts from the industry and research fields and explores how they connect the dots. ■ About Maltego Used by investigators worldwide, Maltego is a graphical link analysis tool that allows users to mine, merge, and map data from OSINT and third-party data integrations for all sorts of investigations—cybersecurity, person of interest, fraud, and more. The podcast streams free on Spotify. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe to our Twitter and LinkedIn to stay on top of our latest updates, tutorials, webinars, and deep dives. For more information about Maltego, visit our website.