Leading Food Delivery Service Company Switches from Homegrown Solution to Fight ATO and Scraping Attacks

This leading food delivery service was experiencing unusually huge spikes of unidentified traffic that overloaded its system. These spikes were ten times their normal peak traffic, which drew the attention of both the security and operations teams. Investigation of the traffic showed that many of the spikes were bot attacks originating from countries outside of the company’s service areas. 

The bot attacks caused performance issues for its customers and restaurant partners, triggering service escalations and complaints. This affected the company’s brand reputation, customer loyalty and, ultimately, revenue. 

To address the challenge, the security team started building a homegrown bot management system that relied on IP-based rules. The do-it-yourself approach consumed hundreds of hours and took resources away from other key infrastructure projects. Despite this effort, sophisticated bot attacks kept coming. This increased risk to the company’s revenue and reduced operational efficiency.

• Accurate bot detection and mitigation: Application Protection is a machine learning-based bot management solution that protects web and mobile applications and APIs from automated attacks in real time. The solution uses behavioral analysis, predictive methods and intelligent fingerprinting to detect and mitigate bad bots with unparalleled accuracy.
• Flexible architecture with easy integration: Application Protection integrated open architecture allowed it to work with the company’s existing web technology stack, including Fastly. Application Protection supports a wide range of content delivery networks (CDNs), load balancers, and web and application servers.
• Low-latency: Application Protection blocks bots at the edge to improve website performance. Having a low latency solution was especially important given customer expectations for quick online food ordering.
• Robust analytics: Application Protection provides real-time attack data, which the food delivery company can easily export to its third-party SIEM tools and use to determine the impact of attacks. By using its existing tools, the company was able to extend the value of its current analytics infrastructure.
• Security expertise and support: The company required vendor support that would act like an extension of their own team. HUMAN offers best-in-class service 24/7/365 via Slack, phone or email.