Field Guide To Preventing Competitor Price Scraping, Unwanted Transactions, Brute Force Attacks, and...

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StubHub's Field Guide To Preventing Competitor Price Scraping, Unwanted Transactions, Brute Force

Attacks, And Click Fraud

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#RSPS15Retail Touchpoints: @RTouchPoints

Distil Networks: @DistilMarty Boos: @StubHub

Rami Essaid: @RamiEssaidAlicia Fiorletta: @AliciaFiorletta

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PanelistsMODERATOR:Alicia FiorlettaSenior Editor, Retail TouchPoints

Rami EssaidCEO & Co-Founder Distil Networks @ramiessaid

Marty BoosSr. Director Technology OperationsStubHub@StubHub

StubHub’s Field Guide to Preventing Competitor Price Scraping, Unwanted Transactions, Brute Force

Attacks, and Click Fraud

Agenda

The growing bot problemThe impact of bots on e-commerce businessesHow StubHub squashed malicious botsSelection criteria for a bot detection solutionQ & A

What Is Web Scraping?Web ScrapingAlso known as screen scraping, web scraping is the act of copying large amounts of data from a website – either manually or with an automated program (Bot)

Legitimate ScrapingScraping can sometimes be benevolent and totally acceptable. For example, the search engine bots that index your website

Malicious ScrapingA systematic theft of intellectual property accessible on a website, including pricing, content, images, and proprietary data

Web Scraping at Large Online Beauty Retailer

Black Friday saw a 100x

Increase in Bad Bots

Challenges Distil Results

Competitors were scraping product and pricing data, using it to lure customers away

Stopped competitors from scraping pricing and product data by blocking bad bots

Traffic from malicious bots was consuming server resources and slowing site performance

Eliminated bad bot traffic, cutting server resource needs by 22% while improving performance

Tracking suspicious IP addresses manually was a tedious manual process

Automated the bot detection and mitigation process, saving valuable IT resources

Beauty Retailer Clamps Down on Competitive Data Mining

One of Europe’s largest online beauty retailers.

We have a handful of competitors that cause us a lot of headaches. With Distil, we’ve stopped them from scraping our data, which protects our competitive advantage. In addition, we’ve reduced the load by 22%, and our customers experience faster response times. ”-Principal Solutions Developer

“

How Big is the Problem?

Up to 60% of traffic on ecommerce websites are Bad Bots

4.2 million IP addresses impacted by “Pushdo” botnet alone

15% bot traffic can equate to hitting each of your pricing pages 30 times per month

Why the Massive Increase in Bot Traffic? Online data has increased in valuePricing information, product availability, product descriptions, and vendor reviews are changing daily and highly valuable to competitors

Anyone can get in the gameCheap or free virtual servers, bandwidth, easy-to-use tools, and scrapers for hire

Bots no longer tied to IP addressesBots cycle through random IP addresses Bots hide behind anonymous proxies Consumer IPs now infected with bot traffic too

High Profile Web Scraping in the Ecommerce Industry

QVC is an American television home shopping network and online ecommerce site.

Aggressive price and inventory scraping by shopping aggregator app resulted in the following repercussions for QVC

● Two day website outage● Loss of $2M in revenue● Highly publicized lawsuit● Damage to QVC Brand

Negative SEO Attacks

Bots steal content, product lists, and prices for duplication elsewhere on the Internet

Duplicated content reduces your company’s uniqueness and thus quality score

SEO damage may result, especially if○Your prices are undercut○The content is repurposed on a more popular site

Bots and Negative SEO Attacks

Bots and Competitive Data Mining

Duplicating your Product PortfolioBots can easily gather product and supplier listsfor replication elsewhere

Undermining your PricesBots monitor your prices, ensuring competitorscan undercut with lower price listings

Availability TrackingIdentifying when your supply has been exhausted provides competitors a unique opportunity to raise the price of their goods.

Bots and Security Breaches

Brute Force Account TakeoverUsing a bot to try stolen usernames and passwords from breaches at other websites on your site

Newly compromised accounts are then used for various forms of fraud/theft

Bots and Transaction Fraud

CardingCreating micro-transactions with stolen credit cards against e-commerce sites to test their validity

About StubHub

Largest secondary ticket marketplace in the worldAn eBay companyProcesses nearly 500 transactions per second

○StubHub is an online marketplace

which provides services for buyers and

sellers of tickets for sports, concerts,

theater and other live entertainment

events.

StubHub Bot Challenges

Bot Challenges○Bots were used for brute force account takeovers

○Competitors tried to game the system, scraping prices, and monitoring inventory and customer behavior

○Random spikes in bot traffic were causing increased utilizationof resources

○Tested multiple competitor solutions, but they were difficult to configure and in some cases broke our website

StubHub Bot Selection Criteria

Bot Detection and Mitigation Solution Requirements○Block web scrapers without impacting human visitors

○Accurately identify good bots vs. bad bots

○Cannot solely rely on rule based systemMust include automated learning to “self tune”for defending against emerging and unknown threats

○Needs to include Distil community to improve accuracy of bot detection

○Must seamlessly co-exist with existing solutions(SIEM, CDN, WAF, etc.)

StubHub Results with Distil Networks

Reduced competitive data mining and fraud

Drastically reduced competitive data mining, increased SEO rankings, and protected our marketplace ecosystem

Distil is a key piece of our fraud detection and prevention suite of tools

StubHub Results with Distil Networks

Improved traffic quality and enriched analytic data

Cut pageviews in half, without impacting human users or ad deliveries

Quality of traffic has greatly improved by stopping unwanted bots and limiting site access for trusted bots

Negative Security Model - Blocking Bad Bots

Positive Security Model - Whitelisting Trusted Sources

The Importance of No False Positives / Negative Impact on Humans

Good bots make up over 35% of all traffic to the average website

○ Search engines - Google, Bing, Baidu, etc.,○ Alexa Crawler○ Pingdom, Keynote, etc.

Effective solutions block bad bots but leave good bots unhindered

The Importance of Accurately Identifying Good vs Bad Bots

Source: Distil Networks, 2015 Bad Bot Landscape Report

Bot detection should never rely on static signatures or manual rule creation

Automation and machine learning must be performed in real-time

Effective bot mitigation solutions ○Dynamically classify users by correlating dozens of data pointsas well as behavior patterns

○Constantly “self-tune” to evolve alongside the morphing threats they encounter and protect against

The Importance of Machine Learning and Self Tuning

○Real-time updates from a centralized violators database help protect all sites and improve accuracy

○Data from attacks detected anywhere on the network should be centralized, correlated, and analyzed by a big data analysis platform

○Signatures are then constantly updated to drastically reduce false positives (blocking humans) and false negatives (missing bad bots)

The Importance of Community Supported Centralized Threat Database

Many organizations have complex web environments which may include a multitude of different solutions including

○Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)○WAFs, FW, IPS○SIEMs○Load balancers○and more..

Bot mitigation must be able to seamlessly deployed alongside these technologies without impacting their performance or usage

The Importance of Seamless Compatibility

The First Easy and Accurate Way to Defend Websites Against Malicious

Bots

The World’s Most Accurate Bot Detection System

Inline FingerprintingFingerprints stick to the bot even if it attempts to reconnect from random IP addresses or hide behind an anonymous proxy. Known Violators DatabaseReal-time updates from the world’s largest Known Violators Database, which is based on the collective intelligence of all Distil-protected sites.

Browser ValidationThe first solution to disallow browser spoofing by validating each incoming request as self-reported and detects all known browser automation tools.

Behavioral Modeling and Machine LearningMachine-learning algorithms pinpoint behavioral anomalies specific to your site’s unique traffic patterns.

How Ecommerce Companies Benefit from Distil

Increase insight & control over human, good bot & bad bot

traffic

○Block 99.9% of

malicious bots without

impacting legitimate

users

○Slash the high tax

bots place on internal

teams & web

infrastructure

○Protect data from

web scrapers,

unauthorized

aggregators & hackers

www.distilnetworks.com/trial/Offer Ends October 15th

Two Months of Free Service + Traffic Analysis

QUESTIONS….COMMENTS?I N F O @ D I S T I L N E T W O R K S . C O M

OR CALL US ON1.866.423.0606

www.distilnetworks.com

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Q & A // PanelistsMODERATOR:Alicia Fiorletta Senior Editor, Retail TouchPoints

Rami EssaidCEO & Co-Founder Distil Networks @ramiessaid

Marty BoosSr. Director Technology OperationsStubHub@StubHub

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