What is a device farm? Types, signals, and detection strategies

The criminals who commit fraud are always seeking ways to appear like real people. Their most effective devices can be found in the devices farm. This configuration allows attackers to duplicate thousands of users at a time which can drain marketing budgets and altering data.

Understanding the workings of device farms will be the very first thing towards protecting your company from fraud that is automated.

What is a Device Farm?

Device farms are a group of tablets or mobile phones which are used to carry out automated tasks on a huge scale. In the legal sense they are used by developers to determine how their apps perform across different screens. But, in the realm of cybercrime they are "farms" are used to engage in fraud with devices.

Imagine it as a massive warehouse with phones that have been connected to charging racks. Instead of a person operating the phones, a computer program manages them all at once to generate fake profiles, and download applications.

How Device Farms Work

These days, device farms operate as extremely sophisticated operations. They're not just a collection of old phones. They are highly organized and created to evade security.

The Physical Setup

A typical farm has hundreds of real smartphones linked via "bus" boards. These boards permit one server to issue commands to all devices at the same time. Security experts are more likely to use real hardware over "emulators" (software that mimics phones) because they are more difficult for the simplest security systems to detect.

Automation and Scripting

Fraudsters employ automation scripts to instruct phones on which actions to take. A script could instruct the phones of 500 to "Open Google, search for a keyword, and click the third ad." Since it's real phones it appears as if that a real person is looking at that advertisement.

Scaling the Operation

To prevent being snatched the farms utilize special routers. They rotate IP addresses for each device. This gives the impression that"users "users" are located all around the globe rather than being in the same space.

Common Uses of Device Farms in Fraud

The device farms act as the "engines" behind several types of cybercrime. These are among the frequent methods they are employed:

Click Fraud: Generating false clicks on paid results, which can drain competitors' advertising budget.

Advertising Frauds: Watching videos advertisements or clicking on banners on websites that are owned by the fraudster to collect illegal ad revenues.

Account Creation Signing up automatically to many thousands of "new user" accounts to receive sign-up bonus as well as referral credits.

App Install Fraud downloading and opening the application thousands of times in order to increase its position on Google's App Store as well as the Play Store.

Promo Abuse: Making use of hundreds different devices in order to use the "one-time-use" coupon code over and over.

Why Device Farms Are Hard to Detect

The majority of security tools search for "bots." However, device farms do not employ traditional bots, they make use of real hardware and operating systems.

Mimic Real Users: They resemble real users The devices come with real batteries, real screens and actual hardware serial numbers.

Distributed Behavior: Since they change IP addresses, traffic isn't coming from a singular "suspicious" location.

Human-like movement: Advanced scripts are able to mimic human-like behaviors including pausing, scrolling, and irregular patterns of clicking.

The Risks for Your Business

Ignoring device farm activity can lead to serious long-term damage:

Financial Loss: are charged for installs, clicks, or leads that never become actual customers.

Untrue Data: Your marketing team may believe that a particular campaign is performing very well but in reality, 90% of traffic comes from farms.

Poor user experience: Fake accounts and bots can cause your platform to slow down and cause frustration for your actual customers.

How to Detect Device Farms

In order to identify an untrusted machine farm you have to go beyond the IP address. Modern fraud detection is based on the analysis of multiple layers of data.

Device Fingerprinting

Each phone has its own unique "fingerprint" based on its hardware and software configurations. If you notice many "different" users all having the same peculiar physical configuration, this is an indication of a farm that is coordinated.

Behavioral Analysis

Human beings don't move with a precise speed and precision. If a thousand users are following exactly the same route through your application at exactly the same speed, it's probably an automated script.

Network Signals

The majority of fraudsters employ proxies or VPNs to conceal their true location. Examining the latency (the amount of time it takes data to move) will reveal whether a user is actually exactly where they claim to be.

Risk Scoring

Instead of a straightforward "yes or no," modern systems offer every session an assessment of risk. If a user is using an unreliable device, an unusual IP, or moves like robots the risk score of their session is high enough to prompt the blocking.

How DeepID Stops Device Farm Fraud

DeepID is designed to detect the things that others don't. We don't look just at individual clicks, we examine the larger patterns that indicate the coordinated activity of devices.

Our SDK identifies suspicious patterns in real-time. By analysing thousands of data points, ranging from physical signatures to network signals, DeepID can differentiate between loyal customers and a device inside a rack.

Our clients' results are:

Improved Fraud Detection: Identifying sophisticated networks that can bypass the standard firewalls.

Improved Accuracy: Reducing "false positives" so your real users never get blocked.

Clearer Insights: Providing your team an uncluttered overview of your data, without the false traffic.

Best Practices for Prevention

Although you cannot prevent fraudsters from trying but it is possible to make your company an "hard target" by following these steps:

Watch "New User" Spikes: Rapidly increasing activity from an area are usually an indication of a device farm in work.

Verify engagement rates: If you've got 10,000 installs of the app but no users actually using the app in the next day, then you may have a fraud issue with your install.

Use Multi-Layered Defense: Don't depend on IP blocking by itself. Add the integrity of your device.

Examine your Ads: Frequently review the source of your traffic in order to make sure your budget isn't going to "low-quality" sites.

Conclusion

A device farm can be a very effective tool to thwart fraud however, it's not completely invisible. As hackers get more sophisticated, businesses need to be able to go beyond basic security. By focusing on the patterns in behavior and deep device analysis you can safeguard your profits and ensure your information remains exact.

Effective detection isn't about stopping bots; it's about checking the person that's on the other end on the other side.