App Bot Frauds and Ways To Protect From Them – Shubham Jha, Sales Manager India, Adjust

Growth in mobile gaming is exploding, more so than ever since the outbreak of the Covid-19. in fact, new data from App Annie suggests that install for mobile game downloads went up 20% in Q1 2020. Nowhere is gaming growth more apparent than in india: a recent Nasscom report showed that among all emerging markets, india is the largest in terms of downloads with over 2.8 billion game downloads in the first half of 2018. But this growth has seen a corresponding rise in in-app bot fraud.

Cheaters use bots -- machines that perform repetitive tasks in an app or website -- to automate gameplay, giving them an unfair advantage over real players. Googling the words “bot for mobile games” yields upwards of 79.5 million results. But how many mobile gamers are really using bots to play games for them? Adjust commissioned a consumer research survey with 500 mobile gamers from the US that finds 41% of respondents admitted to using a bot to win. The gamers surveyed spent an average $65 on a bot, and 12% of Gen Z paid over $200 for a bot. That’s money that’s being diverted away from a 70 | April 2020 game and that might otherwise have been spent on in-app purchases.

Bots are especially damaging to mobile apps because they negatively impact the social experience, taking the fun out of competing. The survey also found that: • 31% of respondents say they always play

against a bot

• 63% say that bots are negatively impacting the game experience, its community and economy

• 39% of respondents think that bots ruin the game for everyone else. Dissatisfied users can also go on to damage a game’s business model fundamentally by causing a game to lose its most valuable users, leading gaming apps to risk revenue and even reputational damage.

N3TWORK, a premier games, media and technology company, noticed early on how bots were being used by millions of people from around the world in order to cheat to win, and also to profit. Because the scope and complexity of cheating with bots is constantly evolving, N3TWORK needed to rely on more than good game design to stop cheaters and sought additional support to help identify and eliminate bot use in its games.

The biggest challenge for many gaming apps is knowing how to distinguish bots from real users. But many bots are designed to simulate human behavior, so this is easier said than done. The clue is to look into the data points that bots can’t fake for example, how users scroll on a screen, battery status, light sensor and even how much pressure humans use to tap. real users will scroll in an irregular pattern which is almost impossible to simulate, compared to the “perfect” motions done by a bot.

For accurate bot detection, machine learning can be used to compare these real behavioral patterns with a bot’s behavior. While this is a huge undertaking for a company to replicate in-house, awardwinning israeli startup Unbotify offers a bespoke solution that is compliant with all privacy regulations. it leverages anonymized sensor data directly from the smartphone, including the device’s accelerometer, light sensor, touch events, and battery status, to identify bots from legitimate users. From there, gaming apps can go on to issue warnings or weed out the accounts using bots, and prevent more from entering the app.

While the aim of many apps is to stem monetary losses from bots, the damage they can have on a game’s reputation is far more damaging. At a time when gaming companies are eager to build brand image, guaranteeing a bot-free experience will be key to building player satisfaction. ■

While the sudden outbreak and spread of Covid-19 has led to a continuing lockdown in India, the situation has exposed the netizens to cybercrimes in the country, with Kerala recording the highest number of cyberattacks during this period, finds a study by IT security solutions provider K7 Computing. The report analyses various cyberattacks within India during the pandemic and reveals that threat actors targeted the state with Covid-19 themed attacks aimed at exploiting user trust.

The sudden surge in the frequency of attacks witnessed from February 2020 to mid-april 2020 indicates that scamsters across the world were exploiting the widespread panic around coronavirus at both the individual and corporate level. These attacks aimed to compromise computers and mobile devices to gain access to users’ confidential data, banking details, and cryptocurrency accounts. The key threats seen during this period ranged from phishing attacks to rogue apps disguised as Covid-19 information apps that targeted users’ sensitive data.

Phishing attacks were noticed more in Tier II and Tier III cities, while the metros fared better. Smaller cities saw over 250 attacks being blocked per 10,000 users. Users from Ghaziabad and Lucknow seem to have faced almost 6 and 4 times the number of attacks as Bengaluru users. In Kerala, regions like Kottayam, Kannur, Kollam and Kochi saw the highest hits with 462, 374, 236 and 147 attacks respectively, while the state as a whole saw around 2,000 attacks during the period – the highest thus far in the country. This was followed by Punjab with 207 attacks and Tamil Nadu at 184 attacks.

A majority of the recorded attacks