Security Wiki

Private Access Tokens are cryptographic attestations from a device vendor that vouch for a client's legitimacy, letting some visitors skip CAPTCHAs.

A bot is a software program that performs automated tasks on the internet. Some keep the web running, others drive spam, fraud, and large-scale attacks.

A botnet is a network of compromised devices controlled by an attacker and used for coordinated attacks, fraud, and proxy infrastructure.

A browser automation framework is software that controls a real browser programmatically, built for testing and repurposed by bots at scale.

A brute force attack systematically tries password combinations until one works, and automation makes millions of guesses feasible.

A CAPTCHA is a challenge designed to tell humans and automated programs apart, protecting logins, forms and checkouts from abuse by bots.

A consent management platform is the software layer that presents cookie banners, records user choices, and blocks non-essential scripts until consent is given.

A data breach is unauthorized access to or disclosure of protected data, the single event that most often seeds the credential-stuffing and fraud economy downstream.

Under the GDPR, the controller decides why and how personal data is processed while the processor acts on its instructions, a split that assigns liability.

A datacenter proxy routes traffic through servers in commercial hosting facilities: fast and cheap, but recognizable by its network of origin.

A DDoS attack floods a service with traffic from many sources at once to make it unavailable, from raw bandwidth floods to stealthy application-layer attacks.

A fake review is a fabricated customer rating meant to mislead, posted at scale through fake accounts and bots, and increasingly regulated as fraud.

The false positive rate is the share of legitimate users a security system wrongly flags as threats, the metric that decides what protection really costs.

A good bot is automated software that helps the sites it visits, such as search crawlers, monitors, and link previews, and identifies itself honestly.

A grinch bot is a scalping bot aimed at seasonal must-have products, buying out holiday toys and gift electronics to resell them at inflated prices.

A headless browser is a web browser that runs without a visible interface, controlled entirely by code, a core tool for testing and for bot operators alike.

A honeypot is a decoy resource that only automation would touch: a hidden form field, fake endpoint, or planted credential that exposes bots on contact.

A mobile proxy routes traffic through cellular carrier IP addresses shared by thousands of real phone users, the hardest proxy class to block by IP.

A passkey is a cryptographic login credential that replaces the password, phishing-resistant by design, synced across devices, unlocked by biometrics or PIN.

A residential proxy routes traffic through IP addresses of real households, making automated requests look like ordinary home visitors.