Challenges
- Without good visibility and clean data, metrics and analytics can be polluted with noise.
- Unsanctioned automation acting against organisations such as REA impose arbitrary costs and impact user experience by consuming resources devoted to serving a legitimate audience.
- Traditional defenses such as CDN, WAF, and other cybersecurity bot mitigation solutions would fall short of adequately addressing current online challenges.
Results
- Achieve protection of its online assets while delivering a superior customer experience.
- Ensure authenticity of portal traffic by blocking very sophisticated and persistent synthetic traffic, swiftly and efficiently, at public endpoints.
- Further subvert bot and scraper efforts by also foiling synthetic countermeasures.
- Maintain a below .001% false positive rate without adversely impacting legitimate traffic.
- Provide tech teams with a rapid response capability when confronted with bot attacks.
- Help back-office teams with access to swift, reliable, 24/7 solution support.
- Support the business teams and the organization’s growth strategy.
REA Group Limited is a leading digital enterprise specializing in real estate. A public company, REA is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and is an S&P/ASX 200 company. The Group operates Australia’s premiere residential and commercial property websites realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au as well as market-leading property sites in Asia and other property sites and apps globally.
The key challenge for any online property company is the safeguarding of its listings data while providing excellent customer experiences. Protecting and maintaining control over online assets and ensuring the authenticity of traffic without compromising the customer journey are constant concerns. Defending valuable data against bot attacks and aggressive scraping by commercial research companies and competitors has become essential to succeeding in today’s digital business environment.
The Pain: Differentiating Between Genuine and Malicious Traffic
REA recognizes and strives to stay ahead of two of the most essential challenges facing online enterprises — visibility and protection while maintaining an amazing user experience. First, without good visibility and clean data, metrics and analytics can be polluted with noise.
A better understanding of synthetic traffic greatly improves our telemetry and analytics. Having a high level of data integrity is important for our market and audience. By quantifying bot from legitimate traffic, we can have high levels of confidence in our metrics. Traditional bot mitigation products and strategies are not up to the task due to the thriving data acquisition industry.
— Craig Templeton, CISO & GM, Group Technology Platforms, REA Group
Commercial scrapers have significant resources to devote toward their business. It’s difficult to have a data monetization strategy if competitors are able to acquire your data assets for free. At REA, we have committed significant resources towards building value from the data and the insights that we have. It’s unreasonable for other actors to leverage, monetize and deriving their own insights on that investment without our consent. A good product must protect our business and growth strategy.
— Craig Templeton, CISO & GM, Group Technology Platforms, REA Group
The Solution: Quick-to-Deploy Traffic Integrity With Kasada
The REA team knew that traditional defenses such as CDN, WAF, and other cybersecurity bot mitigation solutions would fall short of adequately addressing current online challenges. “At REA we have a policy that you can’t deploy a public-facing authentication endpoint without having anti-automation protection,” said Templeton.
REA noted that some vendors were offering endpoint authentication without a clear bot mitigation strategy, and thus, requiring internal engineering development and integration time. In Kasada, REA found what they considered to be both a superior product and a passionate service team that could fully support REA’s high-performance standards and growth-minded goals.
The Gain: Improved Insights and Business Growth
REA selected Kasada for its high-visibility traffic integrity solution with a business-growth model that goes beyond marketplace competitors.
Kasada’s brand proposition is all about giving back control and web integrity, and that’s proven to be exactly right. Kasada provides tremendous visibility. When you have visibility, you can make better decisions. You have control over traffic and, therefore, more accurate data. With more and better data, you can correlate with other data sources.
— Craig Templeton, CISO & GM, Group Technology Platforms, REA Group
Kasada is more than an anti-bot insurance provider. Rather than mere protection, Kasada supports our business growth. The analytics module provides better insights and visibility stripped of synthetic traffic. We know with Kasada we’re looking at real traffic, which means real data and real tools for strategic decision-making and future data monetization.
— Craig Templeton, CISO & GM, Group Technology Platforms, REA Group
