Behavioral monitoring detects anomalous and risky patterns in how users actually move through a website. All web traffic and activity gets monitored, a baseline of typical or normal behavior gets defined, and anything that deviates from it gets flagged.
How it works
A legitimate shopper tends to browse categories methodically on the way to a purchase; a fraudster often goes straight to the page where they can buy an iPad and nothing else. Financial institutions extend the same logic to individual account holders, watching for activity that diverges from a specific user's own established pattern — a strong signal for account takeover.
What to evaluate
- Tracking across pre-login, post-login, and the entire purchase process
- Whether it recognizes large-scale attacks like DDoS activity
- Detection of both general anomalies and fraud-specific patterns
- How often behavioral baselines get updated
- Whether analysis runs site-wide, per-user, or both
Using the results
Flagged activity can route into automated rules or manual review — a merchant might manually review any order where behavior looked atypical, or decline outright based on the severity of the signal.
Worth keeping distinct: behavioral monitoring for sales optimization and behavioral monitoring for fraud prevention share a name but serve entirely different purposes.