Veracity Trust Network has won a S$1 million grant from Singapore’s Cyber Security Agency (CSA). The company will use the grant to develop AI-powered malicious bot detection technology. Interestingly, it will conduct the development work with an unnamed global fashion retailer. The part the retailer will play in the development and deployment will hopefully become clearer later.
Nigel Bridges, Group CEO of Veracity Trust Network, commented, “The problem of malicious bots is serious and getting worse as technology advances. It’s a major issue that is growing in scale, sophistication and damage, with serious negative impact on all online organisations.
“In general, the eCommerce industry has been losing this particular arms race. Veracity was created to try to break the cycle and get ahead of malicious actors. This has clearly been recognised by the CSA, and we are honoured to have been selected by them.”
Who is Veracity?
Veracity is a digital marketing agency turned bot catcher. The company changed focus in 2016 to deal with the problem of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) fraud. Since then, it has developed two products: Web Threat Protection and Ad Fraud Protection. Both are focused on detecting and blocking bots to reduce the security, statistics distortion and fraud that they create.
Bots are a major problem for most websites. They create significant distortion in user and visitor numbers. It means that any analytics are misleading regarding the number of hits and visitors. They also tend to hog resources legitimate users want when on the website, with 50% of web traffic blamed on bot activity. That hit on resources leads organisations to spend more on infrastructure than they need.
From a security and fraud perspective, bots can be hard to contain. Bots are used for everything from scraping data for GenAI products to stealing user data by exploiting website vulnerabilities.
The company claims that 30% of website visits are malicious bots looking to do harm. One of those harms is fraud, such as triggering pay-per-click ads, which cost advertisers money. According to Veracity, US$68 million was lost last year to Ad Fraud.
Detecting and stopping malicious bots
Veracity claims its “Beyond the Edge” technology was the key to winning this award. At the core of that technology is real-time behavioural analysis. It uses that to look at what the bot is doing and distinguish it from a human visitor. It says that it analyses micro-behaviours to identify bots.
The key to the detection of micro-behaviours is the use of AI and machine learning (ML) technologies. These allow the Veracity solution to act independently and learn from different attacks.
It also enables it to use over six years of behavioural data. The company claims that the speed with which the solution works will not only reduce false positives but will also improve response times.
Unlike other solutions, Veracity focuses on the client side rather than inside the customer’s firewall. This allows it to block a bot before it can gain any access to the network. It also enables it to prevent the bot from creating fake user accounts that would give it a footprint from which it could launch other actions.
The $1 million grant will enable it to develop the technology further and, importantly, tailor it to the eCommerce retailer. Given the retailer’s involvement, will this be a bespoke solution? What is the plan to evolve this into an application that Veracity can market?
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
With Black Friday approaching, bots are very much on the minds of all retailers. Using bots to scoop up bargains, grab concert tickets, and make life difficult for customers is a major headache. This is in addition to the two areas that Veracity addresses with its products—web traffic and fraud.
What is especially interesting here is that a technology vendor building an anti-bot solution is a standard story. Winning an award to develop the technology increases interest. However, when an unnamed global retailer is involved, it will always get attention. Who is the retailer? What will its input be? What does it get out of it? Will the final solution be available to other retailers?
None of those questions are addressed in the release or anywhere else. What is also unclear is the timescale. The announcement this close to Black Friday means that it won’t be ready in time for this year’s shopping event. But will it be ready for the late Christmas push or the New Year sales? It will be interesting to see what Veracity announces next for this project.
