Leading Sporting Goods Retailer

The company began noticing an increase in carding attacks, specifically on its e-gift card balance checking page. These types of carding attacks, known as gift card cracking, are increasingly common and difficult to detect. The bots themselves are designed to behave like humans, making them hard to distinguish. Security teams that block bots too aggressively or cannot detect the subtle behavioral differences will mistakenly block human customers. The company needed a solution that could differentiate between a sophisticated carding bot and a human, and one that could easily integrate into its existing tech stack.

Within hours, Bot Defender was integrated into the retailer’s tech stack. The company noted that while Bot Defender offers continuous protection, it is particularly effective during periods of high traffic.

Figure 1: Requests blocked by Bot Defender during attempted carding attacks.

During a recent attack, when over half of its web traffic was malicious, Bot Defender detected and blocked over 397K malicious requests while allowing over 383K legitimate requests from customers to proceed without impact. There was also a noticeable improvement in web performance since unwanted bot traffic was being blocked at the edge.

Figure 2: Time spent on Human Challenge versus reCAPTCHA on verification pages.

Since switching from reCAPTCHA to PerimeterX Human Challenge, the company decreased the amount of time customers spend on verification pages from 66.09 seconds to 34.85 seconds. Removing unnecessary friction had a positive impact on customer satisfaction.

By implementing Bot Defender, the company improved its security posture without negatively impacting customer experience. The company was able to protect against gift card cracking while simultaneously improving its website performance.