“Distil filters through all of our web traffic, ‘distils’ it, cleanses it and makes sure that we don't have to deal with any of the bad bots that try to scrape our sites. It eliminates all the management tasks for us and makes protecting our sites simple.”
-- IT Infrastructure Engineer, Automotive Retailer
Overview
This automotive retailer operates hundreds of stores and websites, where customers can research and order products as well as make service appointments.
In 2013, the company turned to Distil Networks. Their sites were crashing frequently due to bad bots attempting to scrape content from its nearly 100 web properties. Despite multiple firewalls, appliances, and other mechanisms for blocking attacks, bad bots were still getting in and taking sites down. “We experienced a lot of pain and headache trying to manage blacklists and whitelists,” said their Infrastructure Engineer. “We're an automotive retailer, not a web application security company. We want to sell automotive parts, not manage IP blacklists.”
Challenges
- Malicious bot traffic was out of control and causing site brownouts
- Blocking bad bots manually was an ineffective game of “Whack-a-Mole”
- Managing the bad bot problem consumed one FTE
- Blacklisting bad IP addresses blocked legitimate traffic
Deployment
Results
- Improved site performance by 25%
- Eliminated “Whack-a-Mole” approach to bot blocking, saving time and hassle
- Significantly reduced need for management of bot problem, saving 1 FTE for other dev projects
- Legitimate traffic passes through and bad bots are blocked
