NETACEA / CASE STUDY

GLOBAL SPORTSBOOK PROTECTS ODDS IP & INCREASES ONLINE CAPACITY FOR MAJOR EVENT

CUSTOMER PROFILE | CLIENT CHALLENGE | THE SOLUTION: NETACEA | RESULTS | THE OUTCOMES | ABOUT NETACEA

NETACEA.COM / 1

CLIENT CHALLENGEA large global bookmaker was facing high levels of automated traffic on its website and recognised it had a problem with bots but wasn’t aware of the full scale of the issue.

Bots were being used to scrape data and odds from the customer’s website and this large volume of unpredictable traffic was threatening website availability for everyday customers and increasing infrastructure costs across the business.

This malicious activity increased in the lead up to and during peak sporting events. Worse yet, the scraped data was being used to exploit imbalances in the odds across multiple operators. Leveraging Arbitrage Betting in an automated manner, which significantly increased the chances of the risk-free betting. An already estimated £12 million per annum problem.

Despite having a number of solutions in place such as WAF’s, Fraud and Security tools, the business lacked visibility of bot traffic on its website and was dependent on manual analysis to block and mitigate attacks, often leading to false positives whereby legitimate customers were inadvertently blocked. Negatively impacting on revenue.

THE SOLUTION: NETACEAAs part of its vendor selection process, the client ran a Proof-of-Value (POV) with Netacea, implementing the Smarter Bot Management solution in observation-only mode to identify how much of the website’s traffic were malicious bots.

Benefits of the implementation

• Advanced mitigations prevent bots from re-tooling

• Integration enhanced existing security measures

• No additional latency added to the customer journey

CUSTOMER PROFILE

• £1.6bn annual turnover

• Top 10 global gambling company

• 2000+ retail shops

RESULTS• 20% increase in online

capacity

• 85% reduction in unwanted bets placed by bots

• 40% reduction in total website requests

• Overall savings across infrastructure, fraud losses and staffing of £3 Million

• Improved manageability and predictability of traffic patterns

“Netacea has worked closely with us to help us understand the bot challenges we were previously unaware of, enabling us to significantly reduce infrastructure costs and fraud losses.”

- Head of Operations

GLOBAL SPORTSBOOK PROTECTS ODDS IP & INCREASES ONLINE CAPACITY FOR MAJOR EVENT

Netacea provides advanced insight and visibility into your web traffic, allowing you to create powerful actions based on deep machine learning insight, using APIs. Visit Netacea.com to find out more.

NETACEA.COM / 2

Through that identification process, recommendations from Netacea’s Smarter Bot Management were then sent to the internal SIEM solution as requested by the Sportsbook Operator. Depending on the risk of the threat & how aggressive the scraping was, the operator took automated actions of their choosing. These include requesting further verification, CAPTCHA, Blackhole or limiting account functionality.

Operationally this significantly reduced the time for threat identification, decreased the demand on infrastructure and increased the capacity for real visitors to place bets.

THE OUTCOMEDuring the POV, Netacea identified that over 30% of all website requests were made by bots. This became the foundation to a business case that would demonstrate a 5-month ROI on investment, consisting of infrastructure, fraud, operational and security savings.

Now live, the operator has seen its traffic profile smooth significantly and they’re experiencing an 85% reduction in unwanted automated betting by bots, whilst managing authorised automated betting & associated software’s. All saving time that would otherwise be spent on manual investigation.

CPU usage has reduced by 7%, bandwidth by 5.2% and the number of requests by approximately 40%.

Overall, Netacea is helping the Operator deliver estimated saving of £3,000,000 per year and allowing for an increase capacity of real customers at critical times, such as major sporting events

ABOUT NETACEA

Netacea provides an innovative bot management solution that solves the complex problem of account takeover and malicious bot activity for its customers, in a scalable, agile and intelligent manner, across websites, mobile apps and APIs.

Our Intent Analytics™ engine is driven by machine learning to provide an in-depth analysis into all traffic to your site. This gives us an incredibly fast and comprehensive understanding of human and automated traffic behaviour, enabling us to identify and block bots in real-time with unparalleled accuracy.

With machine learning at the heart of our approach, our technology provides an innovative and profoundly effective solution that is configurable to your environment and adapts to changing threats.

Netacea Cloudfront Integration