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How to stop account takeover:
protect every login
Credential stuffing bots test millions of leaked passwords against login pages like yours. ADPAL blocks them at the edge — before a single password is tried.
.SCALE OF THE PROBLEM
A numbers problem, not a
hacker problem
You don’t need to be “targeted” to be hit. You just need a login page
15+ billion stolen credentials are circulating from past breaches – none of them your fault, all of them potentially tested against your site today
Roughly two-thirds of people reuse passwords across sites. One breach elsewhere unlocks accounts everywhere
Account takeover fraud costs businesses billions of dollars annually, and losses keep climbing year over year
Small businesses are hit hardest: no security team, and attackers know it. The attacker isn’t picking you. A bot is picking everyone – and staying wherever the door opens
.WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
How it plays out in a small store.
A real-world pattern we see constantly
A real-world pattern we see constantly:
An online shop with 12,000 customer accounts notices nothing unusual – until Monday. Over the
weekend, bots quietly tested 40,000 leaked email-password pairs against the login page. 63 matched.
By Monday morning: loyalty points drained from 20 accounts, four fraudulent orders shipped to freight-
forwarding addresses, and a support inbox full of angry customers. Total direct loss: about €3,800. The
bigger loss: five one-star reviews saying “this shop leaked my data” – even though the passwords were
stolen somewhere else entirely.
That’s the cruel part of ATO. The breach wasn’t yours. The blame is.
.Symptoms
Signs your accounts are being targeted
You don’t need log files to spot ATO. The business signals come first:
Spikes in failed logins – often at night or in short bursts
Waves of password-reset requests your customers didn’t ask for
“I’ve been hacked” complaints landing in support
Logins from unusual countries or devices on long-standing accounts
Rising chargebacks and disputed transactions
Emails or passwords changed inside accounts without the owner’s knowledge
Loyalty points or store credit vanishing from dormant accounts.
If you recognize 2 or more — it’s worth checking.
.Business impact
Chargeback & support ticket
Every hijacked account opens a dispute and a ticket your team has to work
A lost customer
Trust rarely survives a hijacked account — most affected users churn
Reputation risk
For stores: stolen loyalty points and saved cards turn into public complaints
Server load
Millions of login attempts strain infrastructure before one account is even compromised
.HOW ACCOUNTS GET TAKEN OVER
– leaked username-password pairs from other sites’ breaches, tested against your login. Works because people reuse passwords
– bombarding users with approval prompts until one gets tapped, or hijacking an active session
Most of these share one thing: they’re automated. Stop the automation, and you stop the
attack at scale – regardless of which route the attacker chose
.How ADPAL stops it
How ADPAL prevents account takeover
ADPAL doesn’t wait to see which method the attacker picked. It removes the delivery mechanism – the bot itself
Every request to your login is analysed by behaviour and fingerprint (the unique technical “signature” a browser leaves), not by IP address. That matters: modern attacks arrive through residential proxies, so IP-based defences are blind. ADPAL spots automation in how a request behaves – and blocks it in under 50 milliseconds, before the login form is ever reached
Your MFA and monitoring stay in place as a second line. ADPAL takes the daily assault off their shoulders
Detection that updates itself – no rules to write, no lists to maintain
Privacy-first – cookieless, EU data residency, no visitor data stored
Point your DNS at the managed reverse proxy – live in hours, then a short monitoring period before enforcing. CMS-integrated deployment is available through hosting partners
.DIY vs PERIMETER
What you can do yourself
and where it stops
Measure
Helps?
The catch
Strong password policy
Partly
Can’t stop valid stolen passwords from working
MFA (two-step login)
Yes – keep it
Prompt-bombing and session abuse get around it; friction loses some customers
Login rate limiting
Partly
Attacks now spread across thousands of IPs, staying under every limit
IP blocklists Barely
Barely
Bots rent residential proxies – the same home IPs your customers use
CAPTCHA on login
Barely
AI solves CAPTCHAs at 95%+ accuracy; real customers abandon carts
Perimeter bot filtering
Yes
Blocks the automation itself – before any password is tried
Actionable first step (today, free): turn on MFA for admin accounts and check your login logs for failed-attempt spikes. Then measure the real bot load with a website scan
Business Features
ADPAL Bot Protection
One product covers the full request path for account takeover, and
everything else on this site — no separate module to buy for logins
specifically
.Proof
Seen on real login pages
94%
of credential-stuffing attempts detected before first login try
0
CAPTCHAs shown to real customers
Failed logins dropped within the first week — support tickets about locked accounts basically stopped
.Learn more
Go deeper on login security
Guide
How accounts are stolen — and how to prevent ATO
A practical guide to logs, crawler rules and protection layers
Guide
How to protect your login page from bots
A practical guide to logs, crawler rules and protection layers
Guide
What is CAPTCHA – and when is it useful?
A practical guide to logs, crawler rules and protection layers
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is account takeover in simple terms?
It’s when someone else logs into your customer’s account and acts as them – spending stored credit, placing orders, stealing personal data. The password usually wasn’t guessed; it was stolen in a breach on another website and reused.
How do accounts get taken over if we’ve never been hacked?
Credentials can be stolen elsewhere and reused on your site. Attackers may also use phishing, recovery abuse or other authentication weaknesses. Your own password database does not need to be breached first
We already use MFA. Isn’t that enough?
MFA is a strong second lock – keep it. But bots pressure it daily with prompt-bombing and session tricks, and every attack wave still hammers your login infrastructure. ADPAL removes the assault before MFA is even tested.
Will blocking bots lock out real customers?
Any automated policy can make mistakes. Most genuine users continue normally. Adaptive CAPTCHA appears only in rare, uncertain cases. Monitoring and conservative enforcement help reduce false positives.
How fast can protection go live?
Point your DNS at the managed reverse proxy – live in hours, then a short monitoring period before enforcing. CMS-integrated deployment is available through hosting partners
Lock bots out. Let customers in
Most owners discover ATO after the first chargeback wave. Check
your exposure now – free, two minutes, no signup
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Cookieless · no cross-site tracking profiles · EU (Frankfurt) data residency