Comment by IYasha

3 years ago

Website owhers usually don't realise that some "nicely advertised tech" they're ticking "to protect my poor website from evil hackers" is a damn grenade launcher in an infant's hands. Ironically, they're also shooting themselves in the feet by blocking their own customers.

Losing as much as a couple percent of annual sales to prevent card-stuffers from getting through—which can knock you off your payment processor completely—is a pretty easy call for a lot of businesses.

Not sure how the math works out for ad-supported sites, but it pretty strongly favors "moderately-aggressive automated blocking" for those taking direct payments.

  • It may be understandable if it's on a checkout page.

    But Cloudflare often enough blocks users from reading content pages. Cloudflare could just serve their cached static content instead of showing Captchas.

  • There are several system level and application level ways of dealing with automated traffic, card stuffers, etc.

    Sure, a general solution is better, but since everything today is docker running node.js running without a modicum of caching or appfw in front, not surprised things are so fragile