PS Product SecurityKnowledge Base

👤 Account Takeover, Automation, and Bot Abuse

Intro: Some of the most painful product incidents are low-tech and high-scale: credential stuffing, session abuse, fake account farms, and scripted workflow misuse. They matter because they hit revenue, trust, support load, and customer experience at once.

What this page includes

  • ATO patterns and session abuse ideas
  • bot and automation decision points
  • where rate limits help and where they do not
  • monitoring signals worth building early

Common ATO paths

  • credential stuffing against login and password-reset flows;
  • session theft or replay through weak session handling;
  • MFA fatigue or weak recovery workflows;
  • abuse of linked accounts, support flows, or delegated access.

Bot and automation realities

Rate limits are necessary but not sufficient. Stronger programs also use:

  • device or session reputation;
  • workflow-level anomaly detection;
  • staged friction rather than blanket blocking;
  • better support tooling so false positives are manageable.

Review questions

  • Which flows are most profitable to automate?
  • Which flows change account state or financial state?
  • Can an attacker spread attempts over many IPs, tenants, or accounts?
  • What user-notifiable events should exist after sensitive changes?

Useful telemetry

  • impossible travel or impossible sequence signals for admin and support users;
  • repeated MFA or recovery failures;
  • spikes in login, recovery, invite, or session-creation events;
  • high-volume low-success automation across many accounts.

Author attribution: Ivan Piskunov, 2026 - Educational and defensive-engineering use.