Introducing the F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector for AWS CloudFront CDN

The internet is crawling with bots. Some bots are helpful (ex: search engines), some are benign, and some are malicious. In a recent survey it was found that one in four companies stated that a single bot attack cost their business an average of US $500,000; according to VentureBeat, “Companies say bot attacks result in website downtime, brand damage, higher infrastructure costs, and a poor customer experience. This explains why a majority of respondents (87%) believed effective bot mitigation was a competitive advantage.”

If you are unprepared for a bot attack spike or unaware of what bots might be doing to your app, login page, and customers you are vulnerable to a wide array of problems ranging from: credential stuffing, account takeover (ATO), inventory hoarding, scraping, and gift card cracking.

Kamal Kalra the Director of Operations for VegNonVeg explains, “It’s a dual-pronged problem for us. On the one hand, bots create a bad experience for customers. In addition, they can put overwhelming pressure on our infrastructure that impacts uptime and inflates costs.”

Kalra explains that bots were always an issue for VegNonVeg during product releases on their e-commerce platform. However, he did not have enough visibility into the variety of problems bots were causing. And while they initially tried to solve the problem internally, it quickly became clear to them the bots were adapting too quickly to manage alone: “The problem is ongoing and [occurs] every time we have a mitigation in place.” That is, you’re just as vulnerable if you have inadequate bot defense in place because bots are evasive and constantly retool their attacks.

To VegNonVeg, the value of using Amazon CloudFront, AWS’s CDN, for their e-commerce site was very clear. AWS comes with high quality support, tools/apps, and enables them to scale their infrastructure as needed to meet peak demand. Kalra explained that initially they tried to do things with their infrastructure to mitigate the impacts of bots. However, they were incurring extra costs and the bots weren’t going away.

Ultimately, Kalra and his team decided they needed a solution for their bot problem. They turned to F5 Distributed Cloud (XC) Bot Defense. Immediately, they were able to get more clarity into their bot traffic and all the harm the bots were causing.

As it turned out, bots were targeting product releases, in particular limited release sneakers (sneaker bots). Customers were locked out of the releases entirely and forced to pay more on secondary markets.

With the added clarity into the impacts of bots on customers, it became obvious to VegNonVeg the bots needed to be stopped. Because XC Bot Defense provides the highest efficacy with its AI-driven approach to bot protection, VegNonVeg was confident they could stop the bots without causing additional friction for end customers. They improved the customer experience and saved on costs, including infrastructure spend.

As Bhupalam Jayaveer, CTO of Deltatech Gaming Limited puts it, “One of the biggest ways the F5 solution helped us was with the automation that’s part of the product. And that’s on a real-time basis, unlike most of the products available in the market.” Deltatech also uses XC Bot Defense in front of their AWS infrastructure.

F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense and Amazon CloudFront combine to help organizations deliver secure and engaging customer experiences that are low friction. With AWS, you get the power of their distributed architecture, scalability, performance, and tooling. Because of the success AWS customers are having with XC Bot Defense, we’ve created The F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense Connector for Amazon CloudFront (introduced today). Now you can easily add AI-powered bot defense with a few simple steps.

Download the connector today:
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-x5mf4isftlzcc

Join our live webinar with our customer VegNonVeg:
https://www.f5.com/company/events/webinars/connect-f5-and-aws-to-deliver-secure-shopping-experiences

Read this case study about Deltatech:
https://www.f5.com/customer-stories/deltatech-gaming-ltd-delivers-more-secure-online-gaming-with-f5

Hear from VegNonVeg directly in this video:
https://youtu.be/zDpejWzAmyo