With Valentine’s Day this week, thousands of people are rushing online, scouring sales for jewelry, chocolates, or other gifts to show their affection to loved ones. But there’s something else that loves to take advantage of Valentine’s Day: bot traffic. As Valentine’s Day and other similar gift-giving holidays become an ecommerce extravaganza, the surge in website traffic can mask the presence of harmful bots that are programmed to search for and create additional vulnerabilities in your business. 

According to a report by Security Boulevard, the big sales advertised on Valentine’s Day and other e-commerce holidays are prime targets for bad characters. With more than half of US consumers celebrating Valentine’s Day, the one-day holiday is expected to cost consumers $185.81 each, on average. As consumers rush to websites to nab the latest deal, scalpers can also emerge to hoard products or bots can flood sites, driving up costs for site owners. 

Just like the most quintessential love story of Romeo and Juliet, the relationship between malicious bot traffic and a website busy with holiday traffic is bound to end in tragedy. These bots pose significant risks to shoppers and corporations as well, disrupting business continuity, including data theft, DDoS attacks, and account takeovers. 

Important dates like Valentine’s Day tend to be overlooked as website traffic threats until the consequences make protective measures impossible to ignore. With automation and AI evolving at a quick pace and malicious bots taking on more human characteristics by the minute, the stealthiness of these threats will be significantly higher and its consequences more frequent and devastating. It is important to prepare your website for Valentine’s Day ahead of the actual day by increasing traffic security and ensuring that your website serves only real consumers. 

By putting a web traffic security solution like BotGuard OÜ in place, you can identify and block malicious bots before they have a chance to cause harm. Additionally, it also helps to improve the overall user experience by ensuring that legitimate customers can access your site without interruption and enables you to have more insight into actual customers visiting your site as it removes useless and malicious traffic from the equation. As consumer-based holidays Valentine’s Day send more and more shoppers online, you shouldn’t forget to prioritize web traffic security. By taking proactive steps by deploying a solution like BotGuard OÜ, you can minimize risk to yourself and consumers and stay ahead of bad bots.

Remember, love may be in the air, but so are malicious bots. It’s important to make sure you’re ready for them.

We selectively detect and block malicious web traffic in real time, while granting unrestricted access to a web site for human users, search engines, and affiliate automation tools. Request a Demo.