Dawn of the Internet technology saw the emergence of pc viruses. And, anti-virus packages have been developed to counter virus threats. Now there’s an introduced threat – awful bots, the automatic malicious codes written by way of state-of-the-art programmers. They goal particular websites to execute ‘scraping’, ‘content material theft’, ‘shape unsolicited mail’, and ‘skew website analytics facts’. To overcome this nightmare of internet site owners globally, Pavan Thatha alongside together with his brother Rakesh determined to build ShieldSquare to make a real-time bot prevention answer.
Since its release in 2013, Bangalore primarily based ShieldSquare, has blocked over 9 billion terrible bots, shielding 4 billion+ internet pages to this point. The founding group included Vasanth Kumar Gopalakrishnan, Srikanth Konijeti and Jyoti Kakatkar, apart from Thatha brothers. It turned into incubated at Microsoft Ventures Accelerator, Bangalore.
With a 50 member crew, Shieldsquare has managed to onboard customers from over sixty eight international locations. It is presently operating with main companies along with Seloger.Com (a part of Axel Springer Group) in France, Navent in Latin America, Magicbricks in India and greater.
Why Web Scraping Bots Are A Headache?
Of all forms of bots such as robbery bots, fraud bots, web site abuse bots, and many others., net scraping bots are the most troublesome. Web scraping is maximum not unusual bot that is used against ecommerce marketplaces and on media websites that produce rich, unique and proprietary content material. On one aspect, via stealing pricing information, it makes the ecommerce competition vulnerable, at the same time as for media websites, it affects brands competitiveness, resulting in revenue loss.
As in keeping with the 2015 Bad Bot Landscape Report, China leads the arena in awful bot cell site visitors. Globally, a whopping forty one% of bad bots mimicked human behavior, and simplest 7% of horrific bots disguised themselves as suitable bots (e.G., Googlebot and Bingbot). As in step with any other document, on any given day, over 90 percent of all protection events on our network are the end result of terrible bot pastime.
In simple phrases, for every one human go to on any web site, there could be one bot visit on the website. And majority of this bot site visitors is malicious.
ShieldSquare’s Approach To Protect Website Content
ShieldSquare collects, analyses and detects bots in actual time on the premise of their behavioural pattern at the internet site. Various parameters are accrued approximately the bot’s execution country and surroundings, which ends into a bot fingerprint UUID (Universally Unique Identifier).
This UUID is used to pick out the bot, in place of an IP. This is its specific proposition to efficiently discover human vs. Desirable bots vs. Bad bots while ensuring zero fake positives.
For example, if a programmer launches a bot to scrape abc.Com whilst sitting at a restaurant. And at the same region, a true consumer logs in to abc.Com for browsing purposes. Going the old manner, both each of them will get blocked, or they each will skip, as they shared the identical IP cope with.
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However, for the reason that ShieldSquare uses UUID rather, it will block the malicious bot and passes the genuine user IP. In case the programmer returns with the new bot framework, the new bot’s pattern is acknowledged and a brand new UUID is generated thereby blocking it once more.
Why ShieldSquare Is Unique?
Existing internet security answers, inclusive of Web Application Firewalls (WAF), will guard web sites towards threats consisting of SQL Injection, XSS/DDoS assaults, and alertness vulnerabilities. However, they're ineffective in relation to protective content from automated bots, plenty much less so towards the aforementioned bot threats. Moreover, WAF solutions lack the adaptability to forestall emerging bot threats.
Effectively, there are not an awful lot startups running within the area of bot prevention. Globally, one major competitor for ShieldSquare is Distil Networks, which monitors and filters site visitors on the community level the use of DNS based routing.
On the other hand, ShieldSquare facilitates on line commercial enterprise proprietors to locate and save you terrible bots in actual-time, without the want for DNS redirection. Narendran Vaideeswaran, Director, Product Marketing, explained this as, “Unlike the DNS re-routing technique utilized by different bot detection merchandise within the market, ShieldSquare makes use of an API-primarily based method to defend website from bots, ensuring records privacy and seamless integration with the existing infrastructure.”
Technologies Used At ShieldSquare To Identify Bots
For bot detection, ShieldSquare uses technologies consisting of Dynamic Turing tests – a technique for determining whether or no longer a laptop is able to questioning like a human, Device fingerprinting, User behaviour evaluation, IP Tracking Tests and more.
Here is a video prepared via Wildbeez Interactive that exhibit how ShieldSquare actually works to save you net scraping and other malicious sports.
To identify bots from simple to complicated, ShieldSquare calls for some page hits to understand bot visitors, using one or greater of the above guidelines, earlier than it can mark the visitors as bad. This is also to make certain that there are not any false positives.
The Initial Hurdles Faced
As said by using Pavan, first of all the product turned into not fully self-serve and they needed to handhold customers at some stage in the combination. He similarly brought, “Though that technique labored to get our preliminary customers in India, we couldn’t use that technique to scale outside our domestic base.”
Later, the group worked on making the product integration extremely simple and immediately-ahead. Customers can now combine ShieldSquare’s solution without even speakme to them.
This helped them flow across geographic boundaries and benefit traction in multiple nations.
While working with clients, additionally they realised that every purchaser’s infrastructure is extraordinary and that they need extra options to pick from in phrases of integrating their solution that suits their business good judgment/requirements. “So we released Web server plugins for clients who need to combine our answer at web server level itself. We have additionally launched an on-premise answer for clients who need to set up our solution within their personal cloud,” explained Pavan.
Further, they also started giving special safety modes to customers in phrases of how they are able to deal with the detected bot traffic. Customers can pick out the actual-time protection mode when they need to take action on bots instantly at the server or utility level. Customers can opt for the feed-based protection mode in the event that they need bot prevention on the CDN (Content Delivery Network) or WAF stage.
Becoming Cash Flow Positive In Q1 2016
In Q1 this 12 months, the once a year sales fee (ARR) grew via 3 times and average sales per account (ARPA in keeping with year) doubled to $10,000. As highlighted by way of Pavan, the preliminary techniques to cognizance on getting leads through inbound channels, incentivising customers and it’s free tools- ScrapeScanner and BadBot Analyser, which performed a crucial role in constructing strong basics for similarly increase.
“The extra sustainable manner to attain superb coins waft is to grow sales. There are positive things that might appear unimportant, however as an alternative bring awesome fee. Our employees at Bangalore experience free breakfast, lunch and snacks, while the identical will be applied quickly for our parents inside the Chennai, who are already beating the heat with the unfastened gentle coconuts we provide two times a day,” brought Pavan.
The Road Ahead
ShieldSquare has already raised $300K in angel funding. Its buyers encompass Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham and the three co-founders of RedBus. StartupXseed Ventures LLP, has also invested an undisclosed quantity in the startup underneath its task fund, Aaruha Technology.
It is now targeting to have a more potent presence inside the US. “We are already making our presence as a sponsor in key events (like Shoptalk), and planning to take part in greater such occasions,” said Pavan.
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The group also intend to cater to greater web sites via launching WordPress and Drupal plugins later this 12 months.
“To counter the emerging bot danger landscape, we've advanced contemporary technology that combine intelligent algorithms and enhance them with our statistics technology crew’s knowledge. This enables us stay one step in advance of the bots, and that’s one of the motives our clients respect our product,” brought Pavan.
Editor’s Note
With more than 1/2 of the internet visitors from non-people, there may be lot of cleanup to be completed. The quantity of Internet customers are growing exponentially as well as the wide variety of on line web portals, ranging from ecommerce and on line content generation to airline ticketing.
Good bots are the worker bees of the internet that help its evolution and growth. On the opposite hand, awful bots are the malicious intruders that swarm the net and go away a path of hacked websites and downed services. Although, tech is gambling its function to combat the risk of these bots, nonetheless there's requirement of some floor guidelines to be fashioned.
