When bots attacked, SyntraPXL and Barracuda bit back

Bots are estimated to account for roughly 50% of internet traffic. Some of those bots are benign, and in fact their activity can be incredibly important for businesses in competitive industries. 

But about two thirds of bots traversing the digital landscape are malicious. They are responsible for vast amounts of both corporate and international espionage. They scrape your data, lock up your inventory, clog your servers with junk traffic, corrupt your web analytics data, and generally bring chaos to your digital business.

Detecting and blocking malicious bots has become increasingly difficult thanks to the development of advanced, “low-and-slow” bots that very convincingly mimic human behavior. 

SyntraPXL under fire

Belgian vocational-training firm SyntraPXL provides in-person classes, but students must register for those classes through the company’s website—and at the beginning of 2024, that suddenly became a lot harder to do.

“Every step, every search, every subscription was very slow for each person in our organization and our clients. So, we asked our hosting provider ‘what’s happening?’ In the past, we never noticed this kind of problem because we allocated more resources [to hosting].” --Niels Smets, IT Manager, SyntraPXL

What they discovered was a vast amount of bot traffic originating all over the world. In fact, 91% of traffic to their website was bots—much more than the global average.

Turning to a trusted partner

SyntraPXL already used Barracuda Email Protection and were very satisfied with it. And Niels and his team had run a free trial of Barracuda Application Protection a few years earlier. But at the time, their website and applications appeared to be free of attackers, so they decided they didn’t need it.

Now, however, it was clear that they had a critical need to implement multi-layered bot protection capabilities like those included in Barracuda Application Protection, which uses sophisticated machine learning and actionable intelligence based on crowd-sourced, real-time global threat data. Niels made a phone call, and within a few hours the solution was operational. 

Get the full story

Download the complete case study to learn how Barracuda Application Protection completely resolved SyntraPXL’s bot problem—blocking one million attacks in just the first week of operation, restoring fast website performance, optimizing the user experience, and protecting their core revenue stream.