Israel’s Radware Acquires Indian Bot Mitigation Company ShieldSquare

Israel-based cybersecurity solutions provider Radware has acquired Indian bot mitigation and management startup ShieldSquare. Post acquisition, Radware will offer ShildSquare’s bot mitigation and management product line under its new Radware Bot Manager product line. ShieldSquare will be fully integrated into Radware.

ShieldSquare was founded in 2013 by Pavan Thatha, Rakesh Thatha, Vasanth Kumar G, Jyoti Kakatkar, and Srikanth Konijeti. It graduated from the Microsoft Accelerator programme the same year.

It was backed by investors such as Endiya Partners, RPG Ventures, Anthill Ventures, Startupxseed, Venture Highway among others. So far, it raised three rounds of funding between 2014-2017.

As Pavan Thatha shared in an email response to Inc42, ShieldSquare was started to help online businesses protect against various automated attacks and has built a powerful bot management platform that handles billions of traffic per month.

“As we were scaling our Go-to-market strategy, we couldn’t have asked for a better fit than Radware to take ShieldSquare product to all potential enterprise customers across the globe. Radware’s strong vision, amazing leadership team, strong product synergy and culture fit made it an obvious choice to join them,” he added.

ShieldSquare’s Bot Mitigation Technology

The startup is a cloud-based, real-time bot prevention solution that helps online businesses differentiate between human and non-human traffic (bots) on their websites and mobile applications.

Its technology stack is geared toward preventing and eliminating malicious purposes like web scraping, spam, account takeover, application DDOS attacks and other forms of fraud.

ShieldSquare collects, analyses and detects bots in real time on the basis of their behavioural pattern on the website. Various parameters are collected about the bot’s execution state and environment, which results into a bot fingerprint UUID (Universally Unique Identifier).

This UUID is used to identify the bot, instead of an IP. This is its unique proposition to effectively identify human vs. good bots vs. bad bots while ensuring zero false positives.

For bot detection, ShieldSquare uses technologies such as Dynamic Turing tests – a method for determining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human, Device fingerprinting, User behaviour analysis, IP Tracking Tests and more.

Bot Mitigation: A $1.2 Bn Opportunity

More than half of the traffic coming to a website today comprises of non-human traffic, and the majority of it is malicious. The damage caused by bots and automated attacks severely impacts the competitiveness and growth of businesses.

As a ShieldSquare spokesperson mentioned in one of his earlier conversations with Inc42, of all kinds of bots such as theft bots, fraud bots, site abuse bots, etc., web scraping bots are the most troublesome.

Web scraping is a most common bot which is used against ecommerce marketplaces and on media websites that produce rich, unique and proprietary content.  On one side, by stealing pricing information, it makes the ecommerce competitors vulnerable, while for media sites, it affects brands competitiveness, resulting in revenue loss.

According to a market research report by MarketsandMarkets, the botnet detection market is expected to grow from $203.2 Mn in 2018 to $1,191.1 Mn by 2023, at a CAGR of 42.4%.

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