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Online travel agencies, more commonly referred to as OTAs, are online booking platforms used to compare prices and book flights, hotels or holiday packages. Well-known OTAs include Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor. While we have seen a significant increase in the use of OTAs for booking travel arrangements in recent years, we have also seen a similar rise in OTA fraud. Total fraud loss to OTAs was predicted to grow by 19% to $25 billion by the year 2020.

Scraper bots make up the worst of bad bot traffic for the travel industry, with sites witnessing over 90% of traffic attributed to fare scraping. Whilst this activity can be benign or even used for positive means, if uncontrolled it can impact top line revenue, bottom line profits and customer experience.

Influencer marketing is set to be worth $13.8 billion by the end of 2021, rising from $9.7 billion since last year. With many people working from home during the pandemic, monetizing a social media following by creating sponsored posts for brands has become a popular side hustle. This can be seen by the rapid growth of emerging platforms, particularly TikTok which saw over 2 billion downloads in 2020 and a 45% increase in its use by influencers in 2021 to date.

“Buy Now, Pay Later” (or BNPL) schemes are instant approval loans given at the point of sale on eCommerce websites. They are commonly seen on fashion websites, where shoppers are offered the chance to buy products right away and split the payment for their items over several months. Taking the FinTech world by storm in recent years, well-known BNPL providers include Klarna, Clearpay, Laybuy, Payl8r, Afterpay and Affirm.

It’s well known that we just don’t put services or devices on the edge of the Internet without strong purpose justification. Services, whether maintained by end-users or administrators, have a ton of security challenges. Databases belong to a group that often needs direct access to the Internet - no doubt that security requirements are a priority here.

Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of any business’s online marketing strategy. A well-maintained SEO plan provides a low-cost, long-term stream of relevant traffic into a website. Conversely, bad SEO can be very damaging to a business. Poor visibility on search engines like Google hands revenue over to competitors, forces higher spend on PPC advertising, and can damage trust with potential customers searching for you online.

For those who have played our Boss of the SOC competition or attended our security workshops, you are undoubtedly aware of Frothly, but in case you are not, here is a quick primer. Frothly is a fictional brewing supply company based in San Francisco who has successes and challenges, just like any other organization.