ShieldSquare Takes A New Approach To Malicious Bot Traffic

While the world of viruses has given rise to a number of antivirus companies, not least of which was McAfee, who we had at TechCrunch Disrupt this week in SF, the world of bots has become a bigger and bigger headache for content owners. Bot traffic to sites is much larger than human traffic and it can create a serious problem for sites.

Indeed, last year LinkedIn filed a lawsuit against unnamed parties after discovering that bots were used to scrape data from the profiles of hundreds of thousands of users.

There are scraping bots which steal content; site abuse bots which produce spam on social sites (for example); and fraud bots, which can be highly damaging to businesses. If you can stop bots attacking a site the wins are obvious: increased revenues and improved site performance.

Selected from the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco Startup Alley to appear on stage today, ShieldSquare is a company out of Bangalore, India, which has come up with a solution to this growing problem.

According to co-founder and CEO Pavan Thatha, conventional solutions require businesses to either deploy an appliance in-house or the traffic to be re-routed through cloud servers. But he says ShieldSquare can be integrated into any web application by inserting a REST API and Javascript. This proprietary platform can then differentiate human and bot traffic in a highly scalable manner. It’s now used by websites in 27 countries , and is processing a billion page views per month.

Sites using it include big content portals that don’t want to be scrapped for their unique content, and commerce sites which want to fend off the bot attacks by competitors that want to undercut them.

The Fremium subscription model means that companies can diagnose their site and the upgrade to a paid plan later.

The startup recently raised $350,000 from a group of entrepreneurs and angel investors in India.

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