Enterprise security has (finally !) started to gain momentum among Indian web-based companies and quite a lot of that momentum is fuelled by start-ups offering efficient web-security solutions. Among them, is a Bangalore-based web-security startup ShieldSquare which is probably offering the exact web-security and anti-scraping solutions you require.
Increased amounts of data coupled with flawed systems create the perfect storm, and protecting websites becomes challenging. Because of this, 83% of websites have some sort of vulnerability; it’s not a question of if an attack will happen, it’s when.
Small to medium enterprises certainly aren’t immune from data breaches. If you are considering to rise to a higher platform, you need to realise that an unbreachable security is a key ingredient to build up a successful enterprise. Without it, your business has no foundation. The data that your website as well as business survives on, can be scraped in seconds and replicated in no time (look what happened to Poor Sony).
Simply put, if you are on web, you are under a potential risk and you gotta do something in self defence. Bangalore based web security start-up, ShieldSquare is trying to address this burning issue and has come up with its scraping prevention plan to equip websites to safeguard themselves from the hostility of bots and unauthorized Crawlers.
Before we go on to discuss the tech behind ShieldSquare’s web-protection plans, let us know a brief about Scraping. Web Scraping or simply put, Scraping, is a way of extracting useful info from websites. Bots or crawlers imitate themselves as normal humans crawling websites, and in the process extract info from less-secured websites.
The captcha you see while signing up on a form these days ? Well, it is partially to prevent such scraping events by bots. However, SMEs in India tend to neglect scraping, partly because of the lack of tech and partly because of the lack of knowledge.
ShieldSquare is providing a SaaS based anti-scraping solution, which analysis the pattern of visiting user, identifies whether the user is a bot or a real human, and if found to be the former one, kills it there and then to help businesses protect their content from competitors and malware attacks. Its smart filtering methodology is designed in such a way that it differentiates and makes sure it kills every crawler that is striving hard to get an insight of your business tactics and other sensitive information.
Many internet businesses are getting affected by these Bots as they steal content, perpetrate fraud and generate spam. If you have been wondering for long about your website’s descending rank and revenue generation, this can be one of the primary issues.
ShieldSquare offers its service that identifies scrapers in real time and empowers the site owner to block them. ShieldSquare Cloud service can be seamlessly integrated into any web application by inserting a REST API and a Java Script.
For each web request, ShieldSquare API collects multiple parameters from the HTTP request header and the inserted JavaScript. Additionally, dynamic Turing tests are embedded at runtime and executed on the web page. ShieldSquare Cloud Engine computes the Scrape Quotient for each web request based on the results of Turing tests and by conducting advanced computational and behavioural analysis of the collected parameters.
Based on the arrived Scrape Quotient, the website is empowered real-time to respond to the page request by
- Displaying the page (or)
- Showing a dynamic Captcha as an additional challenge (or)
- Blocking the scraper completely (or)
- Feeding fake data to the scraper.
General prevention strategies are either weak or require constant monitoring and regular maintenance to keep them effective. ShieldSquare does everything on its own and does not prompt you to monitor the activities 24*7.
Apart from offering its tried and tested anti-scraping tech, ShieldSquare also provides you with real-time analytics for your website. You get detailed visibility of your site’s traffic, as to whether it is coming from genuine users, good crawlers or bad bots.
The start-up has received a total of $350K in funding till date from numerous investors under an Angel round. It was incubated at Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in 2013.
ShieldSquare was founded in 2013 by siblings Pavan (CEO) and Rakesh Thatha (CTO), along with Vasanth Kumar (COO), Jyoti Kakatkar and Srikanth Konijeti. It has famed internet companies like popular Indian matrimonial site Shaadi.com and online real-estate discovery platform, indiaproperty.com
