Cybercrime
Cybercrime is illegal activity conducted online — hacking, identity theft, fraud, ransomware and phishing that targets individuals, businesses and governments.
Combat Automated Cybercrime
Stop bot-driven attacks before they succeed
What is Cybercrime?
Cybercrime is crime committed with computers and networks. The phrase covers everything from a teenager running a stolen credit-card list to state-adjacent groups extorting hospitals, which is part of why it is a hard term to use precisely.
For anyone running a website, the useful distinction is not the crime's name but how it arrives. Almost all of it arrives as automated traffic, at a volume no person could generate by hand.
What reaches your website
A site owner meets a narrow slice of cybercrime, and nearly always through a form, a login or an API:
| What arrives | What the attacker is doing | What it looks like in logs |
|---|---|---|
| Credential stuffing | Replaying breached username and password pairs | Thousands of failed logins, each from a different address |
| Carding | Testing stolen card numbers with small purchases | Repeated checkout attempts, high decline rate |
| Scraping | Taking pricing, inventory or content wholesale | Sequential page requests with no images or scripts fetched |
| Inventory abuse | Buying limited stock before customers can | Bursts of add-to-basket inside the first seconds of a release |
| Spam and abuse | Posting links, creating throwaway accounts | Sign-ups from one address range, identical form patterns |
None of these need a software vulnerability. They use the site exactly as designed, faster and more often than a person can, which is why patching does not address them and why a traffic layer does.
Why it is organised as a market
Cybercrime is not mostly individuals. It is a supply chain, and each link is sold separately: breached credential lists, residential proxy access to hide where requests come from, CAPTCHA solving services staffed by people in low-wage economies, and ready-made automation frameworks. An attacker needs no original capability, only a budget.
That structure has a practical consequence. Each purchased layer costs the attacker money per attempt, so defences that raise the cost per attempt — rather than trying to block an identity — work against the economics rather than against the individual.
What actually reduces it
Identity-based blocking fails first, because addresses and fingerprints are the cheapest thing on that market to replace. What holds up is making each attempt cost something and requiring evidence at the point where money or data moves:
- Rate limiting on the endpoints that matter, keyed on something harder to rotate than an IP address
- Proof of work, which charges measurable CPU time per attempt
- Behavioural analysis on the session rather than the request
- Server-side verification of every token, since a client-reported verdict is one the attacker controls
Prosopo's part of this is narrow and worth stating plainly: we stop the automated traffic in front of your forms and APIs. That addresses the delivery mechanism for most of what is listed above, and none of the malware, ransomware or fraud that reaches an organisation by other routes.