Bot Mitigation

Customer challenge

Every year the company produces limited-edition dolls and makes them available for buying online. But as soon as they publish it, bots buy them all. The result is that the company, being the creator of the doll, never has them available on the company’s e-commerce sites. At the same time, it is available on non-company sites for higher prices.

The company tried using signature-based blocking and rate-limiting to stop the bots, but the bot creators are smart and keep changing the bot signatures and behaviors to get around the blocking attempts. This situation has become a PR nightmare for the company.

Traceable AI is working with the company to solve their doll/bot problem using a few characteristics of Traceable AI’s Protection capabilities

AI Behavior Engine – Traceable’s AI Behavior Engine learns all typical API call patterns and API behaviors of an application from calls to, from, and inside applications. This enables Traceable to very accurately identify and take action on anomaly behaviors.

Beat Bots using behavior anomaly detection – The Traceable AI learns the normal API call patterns and API usage behaviors and as a result can identify and block the bad bots, even when they change their approach to avoid signatures and rate-limiting.

Reputation saved – The work is under way (this is hot off the press). The next time the bad bots try to strike Traceable is in place to block them, and the company will once again be able to release their limited-edition dolls and keep them in stock on the company’s e-commerce sites (at least long enough for customers to buy them out), satisfying their customers and avoiding bad press.