An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Kasada offers a unique class of bot-countering security that doesn’t simply mitigate risk. Their Polyform tool may also offer a cost and revenue benefit, especially for customers in highly competitive, web application-based business scenarios.
We know that most hackers today are rather lazy, looking to make easy money by employing bots — automated routines, often downloaded from the dark web — to scan websites and apps for vulnerabilities, poke at domains, spoof users, and carry out exploits to exfiltrate data and interfere with operations.
As much as 75% of a leading site’s traffic can consist of bots, if you add in various forms of marketing and competitive site-scraping for IP, content, data, and things like price comparisons. With sub-second execution times and nearly free costs to run these scripts, there’s little to disincent a horde of bot-runners.
Polyform sits just in front of a site’s application server or CDN to recognize the signature of incoming bot requests on contact, giving each a little proof-of-work ‘puzzle’ to solve before allowing them to continue, perhaps to a destination of the security team’s choice. Sneaky.
Simply adding just a few seconds of delay and computational work makes a site too costly and difficult to bother attacking. The cloud compute and network cost of a brute force login, DDoS attack or constant data scrape would be downright prohibitive.
The real value to the enterprise here is not just in deflecting the bot-burden of infrastructure and cloud costs, but in the application availability and performance boost realized by legitimate customers.
© 2020 Intellyx. At the time of writing, Kasada is not an Intellyx customer. None of the other vendors mentioned here are Intellyx clients. Want to see more BrainCandy? Subscribe today. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com.
