The old practice of a canary in a coal mine served as an early warning system, detecting harmful gases before they claimed lives. Similarly, active web monitoring can be a digital canary — alerting businesses to potential threats before they escalate into full-blown account takeovers.
“Credential stuffing is akin to a thief trying multiple keys on a set of doors.” — David Montague, CEO, myNetWatchman
Common fraud prevention tools — bot detection, IP blocking — are essential first lines of defense that let you “blunt” an attack. But they create a false sense of security: it can be difficult to tell when an attack occurred, and they won’t tell you which accounts were targeted or successfully compromised.
What Active Monitoring Catches That Bot Detection Misses
In a recent real-world example: a company was attacked where millions of accounts were targeted for ATO and over 1,500 were successfully compromised. The attack occurred over a week — and while the company was able to stop the scaled credential stuffing attack, they weren’t aware of the 1,500 accounts that had already been compromised out of the 8 million attempts.
Bot prevention and IP blocking may reduce the size of most attacks, but they don’t prevent all attack activity. Adversaries still hit with smaller-scale attacks and other forms of attacks. Active web monitoring is the canary — constantly testing the environment and sounding the alarm when a compromised identity is detected.
You may need active web monitoring if:
- You rely on existing bot detection: Your current tools may not detect all attack types or identify which accounts were compromised
- You’re still experiencing ATO: Web monitoring can identify root causes and implement additional safeguards
- You need to assess security effectiveness: Provides insights into security tool performance and areas of weakness
What It Covers
- Real-time Monitoring: Continuously monitor for unusual login patterns or unauthorized access attempts
- Behavioral Analytics: Analyze user behavior to identify anomalies indicating compromise
- Threat Intelligence: Stay informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities
- Prompt Response: Have a well-defined incident response plan ready
Active web monitoring is not a complex development effort. For most clients it’s minimum effort — in many scenarios, no development is required, with straightforward implementation and up-and-running in 24 hours or less.
When you really need to know, web monitoring tools provide the peace of mind in knowing you can see issues before your customers — or worse, the press — tell you about them.
The mechanics of how email became the digital economy’s most consequential vulnerability, the case studies that should have changed everything, and what a continuous intelligence approach actually looks like — all documented in “The Lying Gatekeeper,” a special report from myNetWatchman.
Read the Full Report →