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DamnInteresting parent
I did something similar with someone who was using my site’s donation form to test huge batches of credit cards numbers. I would see hundreds of attempted (and mostly declined) $1 donations start pouring in, and I’d block the IP. A little while later it would restart from another IP. When it became clear they were not giving up easily, I changed tack: instead of blocking them, I would return random success/failure messages at the same rate they were seeing success on previous attempts. I didn’t really try to charge those cards, of course.

I like how this kind of response is very difficult for them to detect when I turn it on, and as a bonus, it pollutes their data. They stopped trying a few days after that.


lelanthran
Yup. The only real way to stop bots is be convincing the operator that your data is poisoned.

That means you need to poison the data when you detect a bot.

simondotau
Was it always $1? If I was the attacker, surely you’d pick a random number. My guess is that $1 donations would be an outlier in the distribution and therefore easy to spot.

It’s also interesting that merchants (presumably) don’t have a mechanism to flag transactions as being >0% chance of being suspect. Or that you waive any dispute rights.

As a merchant, it would be nice if you could demand the bank verify certain transactions with their customer. If I was a customer, I would want to know that someone tried to use my card numbers to donate to some death metal training school in the Netherlands.

DamnInteresting OP
They did try adding variations to the amount (+0.50-1.00) late in the game, but by then it was ineffective, I could still quickly detect them and turn on the randomized data poisoning. I expect that they want to keep the amount small so most cardholders won't bother to look into the unfamiliar charge.

I do wonder whether these people sold their list of "verified" credit card numbers to any criminal enterprises before they realized the data was poisoned. That would be potentially awkward for them.

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