01732 759725 33 magazine Q&A With Stewart Boutcher, Chief Technology Officer and Data Lead at bot detection company Veracity Trust Network Q&A adhere to regulations like GDPR, and negative publicity and loss of customer confidence. Companies that handle sensitive customer information, such as e-commerce sites and financial institutions, are most at risk of bad bots, but any organisation with an online presence could be a target. BI: How did you end up focusing on bot detection and what is your target market? SB: Veracity has evolved from our original digital marketing software platform, Beacon, which I set up alongside my fellow Veracity Trust Network founders, Nigel Bridges and Mike Townend, in 2016. At the time, we were running a digital marketing agency in Leeds and were experiencing a real problem with bot-based click fraud which was wasting as much as 40% of ad budgets for PPC and paid social campaigns. To counter this problem and maximise digital advertising spend and ROI, we developed the Beacon Ad Fraud solution which detects and blocks bots on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Search Ads and Microsoft Search Ads. Over the last seven years, we have continued to develop this product, adding new capabilities and new use cases to the point where it made sense to offer two distinct solutions: the original Beacon click fraud solution, now called Ad Fraud Protection, and a new website protection solution designed to protect websites, mobile apps and APIs from automated bot attacks. On March 3, coinciding with the launch of Website Threat Protection, we rebranded from Beacon to Veracity Trust Network. BI: How does Website Threat Protection prevent bot attacks? And what benefits does this bring to users? SB: Website Threat Protection adds an extra layer of protection to existing defences by checking whether a visitor to a website is a ‘bot or not’ prior to the usual identity validation process. Through our partnership with data and analytics specialists Cynozure we have been able to create a first-of-its-kind machinelearning model for detecting bots trying to access an organisation's digital platforms. Because this model is trained to detect bots on new datasets and behavioural data points, for example mouse movements and time spent on a certain page, we reduce the risk of ‘model drift’ – a decline in the effectiveness of data used by a rules-based detection engine as bots evolve and adapt to evade detection. BI: How do you expect bots to evolve in the future? SB: Advances in quantum computing will make the technology that drives bots even more sophisticated. Already, we’re starting to see hackers take data out of systems they can’t break, so that when quantum is more affordable and truly comes into play they’ll be able to unleash all this information and wreak havoc. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not set up to carry out sophisticated attacks to the extent that quantum computing is, but it is still a big threat to online businesses. Companies really need to start taking the threat posed by bad bots seriously. www.veracitytrustnetwork.com Business Info (BI): What problem does Veracity Trust Network solve for its customers? Stewart Boutcher (SB): Our utter focus is on the detection of malicious bots in online traffic. Bots – non-human programs used to carry out fraud, account takeover, content scraping and other criminal activities – make up a high percentage of all internet traffic and can be hugely detrimental to a company’s website traffic and performance, as well as to its online budget. Safeguarding websites against bots is vital. Unfortunately, distinguishing bots from genuine users can be difficult, as the only way to identify whether a user is human or not is to analyse their online footprint, which is just what bots try to replicate. Our Website Threat Protection solution helps to solve this problem by identifying malicious bots and blocking them from engaging with websites. BI: According to the latest statistics, 42% of online traffic is generated by bots. How big a problem are they? SB: It is important to note that not all bots are bad. In fact, some are very useful, like those used to index websites, which help companies to optimise speed and performance and thereby improve the overall user experience. While good bots outnumber malicious ones, bad bot activity is still a substantial threat to organisations. By allowing malicious bots to run riot on their websites, businesses risk loss of revenue through website downtime and degraded performance, added operational expense (including infrastructure and authentication costs), penalties for failing to Stewart Boutcher
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