Global Medical Supply Provider Curbs DDoS Attacks With DataDome

A leading global manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies was experiencing frequent DDoS attacks, which occasionally slowed down the website to the point of making it unavailable for real users. Their CDN’s bot management system was letting too much automated traffic through, prompting the operations team to look for stronger protection. After a smooth free trial process, the company selected DataDome, which now stops DDoS attacks and other bot-driven threats before they can do any harm.

The Problem: DDoS Attacks Take Website Offline as Existing Bot Protection Lets Malicious Traffic Through

As a prominent global player in its industry, a medical supplies manufacturer was used to sudden spikes in the volume of requests to their website. For the most part, the traffic spikes didn’t do any actual damage. Until one day…

“Our system was getting pounded,” the E-Commerce Product Owner recalls. “The most calculation-intensive service on our public website was being hit really hard, and the site was becoming slower and slower until it was effectively down for a lot of people.”

The company did have a CDN with an activated bot management feature, but as the operations team discovered, it did an inadequate job of identifying and blocking bots.

“We were being attacked from just four different IP addresses. But as soon as we blocked them, four others would show up. For a couple of days, we were doing nothing but blocking IPs, and we said to ourselves that there had to be a better way.” 

At the time, there were also regular news stories about cyberattacks from certain not-so-friendly countries, and the company did not want to make those headlines. The product owner and his team set out to find a more robust DDoS protection solution.

The Solution: Affordable Bot Protection on Autopilot

Research led them to DataDome and a handful of other vendors specializing in bot protection.

“DataDome was more reasonably priced than some of the other options we looked at, but the main reason for our decision was the automated side of it: the fact that we didn’t have to do anything once it was set up. We’re always starved for resources, so being able to set it and forget it was very attractive to us,” says the product owner. 

“And for the most part, that’s true. We have had a couple of bot attacks in the last few days. I’ve received email notifications about it, looked at the dashboard to see all the traffic that was being blocked, and that was it. I didn’t have to do any analysis, make any phone calls, or escalate anything.”

The operations team also appreciated DataDome’s responsive onboarding and integration support, and being able to communicate through a dedicated Slack channel.

The Results: Hands-Off Bot Protection, Responsive Support

Soon after the company activated DataDome’s protection, the bots were back—but this time, they were stopped before they could do any damage. And since then, the operations team has mostly been able to forget about bot-related issues.

“We’ve had a couple of instances with new kinds of bots that were getting through, but within a few hours, the protection was adjusted. And while DataDome was investing their expert resources and coming up with a solution, our CDN provider didn’t see that there was any problem: they said the traffic was mostly human, which we knew wasn’t true,” says the product owner.

“It’s in instances like this I’m really glad that we implemented DataDome,” he continues. “The impact was dramatically lower than it could have been: instead of affecting some customers for an hour or two, it could have taken down the entire site for everybody.”

Summing up: “By blocking attacks, DataDome has made us less of a target for those attacks. That’s success,” he concludes. “And if a new type of bot does get through, the team is always available to respond and adjust. That’s big success.”