Concept: British startup Netacea has unveiled a bot management solution that protects mobile apps, websites, and APIs (Application Programming Interface) from malicious attacks including credential stuffing, scraping, and account takeover. It helps organizations and technical decision-makers secure websites from automated attacks by leveraging real-time threat intelligence and ML. The technology does not require customers to insert code on their web pages, allowing it to remain undetectable to attackers while simultaneously securing mobile apps and APIs.

Nature of Disruption: Netacea’s server-side strategy ensures that all traffic to the website, mobile app, and API is visible, allowing for effective visitor monitoring. Fraudulent behavior gets blocked, redirected, or questioned automatically, and businesses are alerted to potential threats. Its multi-layer bot identification algorithm is used to identify known fraudsters as well as change attack patterns for all visitors. Netacea’s predictive analysis also predicts where distributed attacks would strike next, allowing them to be stopped before they occur. It uses three layers of defense to provide the best possible mix of detection speed and accuracy, reducing both false positives and false negatives. Netacea Active Threat Database is a customer-specific, continually updated repository of all threats and recommended responses. As threats are found or deleted, this is updated millions of times instantaneously. Customers can see new threats identified across the Netacea network within milliseconds of them being discovered. Its ML-powered Intent Analytics engine differentiates bots from humans quickly and accurately, protecting websites, mobile apps, and APIs against automated attacks while prioritizing genuine users. Businesses can choose to block, redirect, or challenge attacks in real-time, or receive alerts about potential dangers, leveraging a risk-based scoring system, data-rich dashboards, and better visualizations.

Outlook: Bot management is critical for safeguarding an organization’s and customers’ business logic from sophisticated automated bot attacks. Traditional techniques to bot management are no longer sufficient, as a simple rules-based approach cannot adequately meet these issues. To enable security suites, dedicated bot management solutions that can adapt to new threats and utilize new threat intelligence are necessary. Netacea’s customers include US-based stock photography company Shutterstock. In February 2022, the startup has raised $12M in series A funding from Mercia Asset Management and individuals from Malwarebytes, CrowdStrike, and KnowBe4. The funds would be used to increase its presence in the United Kingdom and the US, as well as to expand its technical team in data science, development, data analysis, and threat research.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk