A software that takes only 30 minutes to create, can scrape off content from most websites at the same time frame. In a few minutes, this malicious softwares can steal the content which will be completely oblivious, to the content owner. Data theft is becoming a major concern for businesses; there are important data of the company as well as their clients that cannot be compromised. Such software is used to illicitly publish valuable information, gain competitor’s business also undercut competitor’s prices. This is where ShieldSquare comes in. In short, ShieldSquare helps unearth non-human traffic on the website. The website owner can stop this unwanted traffic by blocking it or showing captcha images.
It uses a combination of dynamic bot challenge system, behaviour pattern analysis, device and network profiling from where the website is accessed to identify, detect, assess and protect against site scraping done on the website. Founded in 2013 by siblings Pavan Thatha and Rakesh Thatha along with Vasanth Kumar, Jyoti Kakatkar and Srikanth Konijeti, the company has received a total funding of $350K (over Rs 2 crore) from numerous investors including the founders of RedBus, BharatMatrimony.com, Shaadi, Freshdesk, Fusioncharts and others. The team members who are from IIT Madras and IIT Bombay, had earlier built an enterprising security product, Array Shield. This experience pushed them to develop ShieldSquare.
The SaaS based solution’s service increases revenues, improves site performance and enhances customer experience for its clients. It analyses traffic requests from millions daily and uses Big Data to ward off any suspicious behaviour. Pavan says, “Clients like IndiaProperty started using our service when we were in Beta stage. We are looking at expanding to many other countries other than India and Australia where we have many clients.”
ShieldSquare’s cloud based API is available on a monthly subscription model. In fact, the prices start from as low as $59 (Rs 3,500 approx) per month. The pricing is based on the number of API requests that translates to the number of page views on the website.
ShieldSquare works with listings/classified portals like RealEstate, Automotive and local search sites to protect their unique listings on their website from being replicated by other competitor sites. It also helps them prevent spam leads that irritate advertisers. They also work closely with job and marriage portals so that recruiters will not be able to download resumes using unauthorised means or a user’s private data is protected from abuse.
Rakesh says that ShieldSquare’s competitors have solutions that require customers to either deploy an appliance in-house or the traffic to be re-routed through cloud servers while theirs is a technology where the product can be seamlessly integrated with an API making customer adoption smooth.
— mathew.maniamkot@gmail.com