Retail TouchPoints' Retail Strategy & Planning Series session brought to you by Distil Networks #RSPS15

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#RSPS15
StubHub's Field Guide To Preven5ng Compe5tor
Price Scraping, Unwanted Transac5ons, Brute
Force AAacks, And Click Fraud
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#RSPS15
Retail Touchpoints: @RTouchPoints
Dis5l Networks: @Dis5l
Marty Boos: @StubHub
Rami Essaid: @RamiEssaid
Alicia FiorleAa: @AliciaFiorleAa
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About Retail TouchPoints
ü Launched in 2007
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Panelists
MODERATOR:
Alicia Fiorle9a
Senior Editor, Retail TouchPoints
Rami Essaid
CEO & Co-Founder
Dis5l Networks
@ramiessaid
Marty Boos
Sr. Director Technology Opera5ons
StubHub
@StubHub

6. StubHub’s Field Guide to Preventing Competitor Price
Scraping, Unwanted Transactions, Brute Force Attacks,
and Click Fraud

7. Agenda
The growing bot problem
The impact of bots on e-commerce businesses
How StubHub squashed malicious bots
Selection criteria for a bot detection solution
Q & A

8. What Is Web Scraping?
Web Scraping
Also 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 Scraping
Scraping can sometimes be benevolent and totally
acceptable. For example, the search engine bots that
index your website
Malicious Scraping
A systematic theft of intellectual property accessible on a
website, including pricing, content, images, and
proprietary data

9. Web Scraping at Large Online Beauty Retailer
Black Friday saw a
100x Increase in
Bad Bots

10. 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
“

11. 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

12. Why the Massive Increase in Bot Traffic?
Online data has increased in value
Pricing information, product availability,
product descriptions, and vendor reviews are
changing daily and highly valuable to
competitors
Anyone can get in the game
Cheap or free virtual servers, bandwidth, easy-
to-use tools, and scrapers for hire
Bots no longer tied to IP addresses
Bots cycle through random IP addresses
Bots hide behind anonymous proxies
Consumer IPs now infected with bot traffic too

13. 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

14. 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

15. Bots and Competitive Data Mining
Duplicating your Product Portfolio
Bots can easily gather product and supplier lists
for replication elsewhere
Undermining your Prices
Bots monitor your prices, ensuring competitors
can undercut with lower price listings
Availability Tracking
Identifying when your supply has been exhausted provides competitors a unique
opportunity to raise the price of their goods.

16. Bots and Security Breaches
Brute Force Account Takeover
Using 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

17. Bots and Transaction Fraud
Carding
Creating micro-transactions with stolen credit cards
against e-commerce sites to test their validity

18. About StubHub
Largest secondary ticket marketplace in the world
An eBay company
Processes 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.

19. 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 utilization
of resources
○ Tested multiple competitor solutions, but they were difficult to
configure and in some cases broke our website

20. 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 system
Must 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.)

21. 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

22. 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

23. Negative Security Model - Blocking Bad Bots

24. Positive Security Model - Whitelisting Trusted Sources

25. The Importance of No False Positives / Negative Impact on
Humans

26. 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

27. 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 points
as 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

28. ○ 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

29. 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

30. The First Easy and Accurate Way to Defend
Websites Against Malicious Bots

31. The World’s Most Accurate Bot Detection
System
Inline Fingerprinting
Fingerprints stick to the bot even if it attempts to
reconnect from random IP addresses or hide behind
an anonymous proxy.
Known Violators Database
Real-time updates from the world’s largest Known
Violators Database, which is based on the collective
intelligence of all Distil-protected sites.
Browser Validation
The 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 Learning
Machine-learning algorithms pinpoint behavioral
anomalies specific to your site’s unique traffic
patterns.

32. 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

33. www.distilnetworks.com/trial/
Offer Ends October 15th
Two Months of Free Service + Traffic Analysis

34. 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 ON
1.866.423.0606
www.distilnetworks.com

35. #RSPS15
Q & A // Panelists
MODERATOR:
Alicia Fiorle9a
Senior Editor, Retail TouchPoints
Rami Essaid
CEO & Co-Founder
Dis5l Networks
@ramiessaid
Marty Boos
Sr. Director Technology Opera5ons
StubHub
@StubHub

36. #RSPS15
hAp://www3.retailtouchpoints.com/rsp15/
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