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By Cara Garretson
A start-up that grew out of the Georgia Institute of Technology has launched two products designed to help organizations detect and shut down botnet activity on their Web sites.
The company, called Pramana, says it hopes the new offerings will cut down on the amount of botnet traffic experienced by Web sites, which often leads to fraudulent activity. Botnets are networks of compromised PCs that are awakened and controlled by a central server, which assigns them fraudulent tasks such as logging keystrokes and stealing financial or sensitive information. Botnets can also post links on Web sites to malicious sites that download malware to increase the ranks of the bots on the net, and can steal content from sites.
Pramana's BotAlert is a free utility that reports on the level of botnet activity occurring on a given site. The utility is implemented on any of the interactive pages on a site (such as a registration page, comment page or message board) and generates daily reports that break down human versus automated traffic, offering companies a view into how much activity on their sites is generated by botnets, says the company.
"BotAlert is like Google Analytics for bot traffic, and it's free, easy, robust and very useful," said David Crowder, CEO of Pramana. "Whether it's a direct cost, loss of reputation or wasted resources, bots impact the bottom line. By identifying the scope and nature of their problem, website owners can improve utilization of their website, increase customer retention, and stop online abuses."
To help companies take action against the botnet traffic on their sites, Pramana offers BotBlock, a tool that detects botnet activity in real time without degrading the performance of the site or interfering with the user experience. Once detected, the tool can take one of a number of preset measures to either block the bot activity or feed it false data.
Pramana is pitching BotBlock as a more effective alternative to CAPTCHA tools. CAPTCHA tools can interfere with users' experiences and, according to Pramana, can lead to as much as 10 percent of Web site visitors abandoning the site instead of entering information. In addition, botnet creators have engineered ways around CAPTCHA screens, which are designed to determine human users from automated ones by requiring them to read text and enter matching numbers and letters into a box.
In an April 20 blog post, CEO Crowder offered some explanation about how the company's patented technology works, stopping short of divulging trade secrets. Crowder said that when determining whether input into a Web site was generated by a human or computer, the technology tracks the surrounding events, figures out why events were triggered, considers users' environments and behavioral data, and looks for anomalies.
"Any one of these things by themselves isn't very reliable but all of them together have provided us with a system that catches bots at least 95 percent of the time and erroneously labels a human as a bot approximately 1 percent of the time," said Crowder.
BotAlert is available now as a free download from Pramana's Web site. BotBlock is priced between $19.99 and $299.99 per month, depending upon the number of transactions it is set to monitor.
Based in Atlanta, Pramana was founded in 2007 and provides Internet fraud-protection tools.
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