Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

"Fraudsters will combine various tooling and commodities to perform fraud at scale, but it's not always obvious what they are using, or for which purpose. Having said that, we have observed threat actors discuss the use of AI to reverse-engineer anti-bot protection or to automate scripting tasks. AI is unique in that it gives leverage from script kiddies all the way to professional scrapers."

"The inquisitive bots have been hitting DRAM product pages on e-commerce sites at a rate almost 6x more often than legitimate users and friendly crawlers. And these memory sniffers have been relying on a technique known as cache busting to ensure they get the most up-to-date information. Cache busting involves appending parameters to page requests so they appear different from prior requests."

Web scraping bots are intensifying pressure on DRAM supply chains by conducting large-scale automated inventory searches across e-commerce platforms. Security firm DataDome identified a coordinated operation submitting over 10 million scraping requests targeting DRAM and hardware components like DIMM sockets. These bots query inventory every 6.5 seconds at rates nearly six times higher than legitimate users. Operators employ cache busting techniques to obtain real-time product availability data and throttle requests to avoid detection. Threat actors increasingly leverage AI tools to automate scripting tasks and circumvent anti-bot protections, enabling both amateur and professional scrapers to conduct fraud at scale.

Read at Theregister