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On The Launch of Shape Connect

by David Holmes on May 7, 2019

Shape spent the last eight years building a machine-learning engine that has a single focus: to distinguish humans from robots on the Internet. The engine is constantly learning as it processes over a billion transactions every day from 25 percent of the consumer brands in the Fortune 500. It’s actually a billion-and-a-half on payday and National Donut Day (June 7, thank you, Dunkin’ Donuts).

We’ve made this incredible engine available to everyone and we call it Shape Connect. Connect is self-serve, takes minutes to set up, and is free for two fortnights (yes, GenZ, that’s the correct spelling).

Why is Connect so revolutionary? Distinguishing automation (bots) from humans is the most difficult, and most pressing, challenge on the Internet. Stopping fake traffic should be job #1 for any website that has value—yet, Facebook, Twitter, and Google all struggle with fake traffic. Shape Security can, and we’re practically giving the service away. Why? Too many reasons to go into here, but check with us after therapy and we might talk.

Solving Modern Problems

Okay, okay, so we built a computer that can identify other computers. How does this help you? Many businesses are being defrauded by bots and don’t even know it. They might know they have a problem of some kind but not understand that automation is the real threat vector.

Credential Stuffing Causes HUGE Business Losses

Credential Stuffing: Shape didn’t invent it, but we DID name it. It’s where malicious actors acquire login credentials belonging to blithely unaware Internet users, employ bots to pour billions of username/password combinations into millions of websites, then drain users’ accounts of money, credit-card numbers, email addresses, and other valuable stuff.

Sponsorships Available

Website breaches resulting in gargantuan credential spills are common occurrences these days despite mighty efforts to boost privacy and security measures. A sophisticated criminal industry has sprung up that uses automation to access online accounts across the board, including social media, retail, banking, travel, and healthcare.

What credential stuffing looks like before Shape Connect stops it

Believe it or not, credential stuffing-related activity can make up more than half of a website’s traffic. It’s estimated that this kind of nefarious pursuit results in business losses of over $5 billion annually in North America alone.

Gift Card Cracking

Another super-annoying problem is the cracking of online gift-card programs. Most gift-card programs allow recipients to check the card balance online. Attackers create bot armies to check the balance of every possible gift-card number! When they find a gift-card number that has a positive balance, they use it to purchase re-sellable goods before the recipient can use the card. Isn’t that horrible? It costs retailers millions of dollars per year.

Business Logic Mischief

But it gets worse. Almost any site that has significant intellectual property in its business logic is either being attacked or is at risk. Consider the stalwart health-insurance company. Insurance websites allow you to get premium estimates based on your profile. Their rates are based on diligent research and proprietary actuarial tables accumulated over decades of experience. One of our customers found that a competitor was creating millions of fake profiles, each with a slight tweak to its age, income, and pre-existing condition to map out the insurer’s quote-rate tables. What took decades to create was being stolen by a competitor using bots. That’s not fair, is it?

Are You Dating a Robot?

One of the curious facts that emerged from the aftermath of the Ashley Madison breach in 2015 was that a significant number of the female profiles on the ~~affair~~ dating site were fake. They’d been created by bots to yield vehicles by which swindlers around the world could establish online relationships with men whom they would then defraud through a money transfer. While Ashley Madison is no longer with us, there are other, less controversial dating sites that still have the same problem. Shape helped one of them deal with fake-account creation, leading to a much lower probability of robot dating. (Sorry, robots, true love is for humans.)

Hotels and Airlines: Point Theft

Hotels and airlines have their own currencies in the form of loyalty program “points” or “miles.” These have long been a target for fraudsters who can take over thousands of accounts, merge all their points, and convert them into re-sellable goods. In many cases, attackers prefer going after points. Your average consumer will notice immediately if their bank account is drained, but may not quickly (or ever) notice that their points are gone. They might just assume the points had expired. Room rates and flight fares are another form of intellectual property, and aggregators scrape the sites constantly, pulling rate information for competitors, leading to overly low “look-to-book” rates.

Fight The War Against Fake

Those are just a few examples of automation as a threat vector for business. We could tell you about a million cases of sophisticated bots threatening every different type of business, but we hope you get the picture already.

So let’s get back to Shape Connect, what it is, and how it works.

How Shape Connect Works

Our fully cloud-based service stands staunchly between your site and the Internet, deflecting bots and protecting you credential stuffing, DDoS, account takeovers, gift card cracking, and all other malicious activity done at scale.

We’ve put together a couple of videos showing how Shape Connect works to protect your site. For those of you blessed with short attention spans, we have a 90-second, visually stimulating cartoony video (above).

If that piques your interest and you want the whole story, here’s a six-minute video that goes deeper into the workings of Shape Connect.

And if you’re a reader, we’ll break it down for you right here.

Without Shape Connect, there’s nothing between your website and the user’s browser. But what if it’s not a browser or a real user? Both real users and bots follow the same steps to get to your site.

The client (user or bot) queries DNS.
DNS returns the IP address of your website (or load balancer or cluster, or whatever).
The browser or bot sends a request directly to your website.
Your website returns the response.

With Shape Connect, there’s a layer of protection between your site and the user or bot.

DNS returns a dedicated Shape Connect IP to the user or bot.
All client requests are routed through Shape’s Secure CDN for fastest response.
Shape Connect absorbs any DDoS attacks that the client might have sent.
Shape Connect’s artificial intelligence determines if the request came from a real human using a real browser or from an automated bot. It passes only human requests through to your website.
Your website responds only to legitimate requests, sending the data back through Shape Connect and to the human at the other side.

Of course, if you have “trusted bots” that you want to allow, you can manage your own whitelists.

With the Shape Connect Dashboard, you can see all the requests that have come through, and marvel at all the automated malicious requests that Shape blocked!

Your Honor, I Object!

The rest of the industry is catching on to the bot problem, and some are pushing approaches that differ from Shape Connect.

What about WAF?

One of those alternative solutions is so-called “bot management” integrated into a Web Application Firewall (WAF). We’re seeing many WAF vendors trying this, but failing. Here’s a long treatise that explains why we think WAF is a suboptimal approach.

What about PCI?

With Shape Connect, you can drive away all unwanted automation and still be PCI compliant. We’ve got more details for you in this informative and colorful brochure.

Connect with Shape Connect

To celebrate the official launch of Shape Connect, we were going to throw ourselves a gigantic poolside party, with mumble rappers from LA and rivers of Henny. But we decided, instead, that it would be more fun to watch all the new customers come in and bask in the delight they experience as they get connected.

Shape Connect is live right now, and if you’re comfortable and confident, you can sign up for a free trial. But we’re also here if you want to chat first about how Shape Connect can secure your business, reduce your latency, keep your servers afloat, and improve your customer experience journey. Talk with you soon!