Group-IB’s Preventative Proxy, which has the capacity to protect 160 million users against malicious bots, has been included in Rospatent’s top-10 most important Russian inventions 2020.
Group-IB is the only company representing the internet industry to enter Rospatent’s ranking (Russia’s Federal Agency for Intellectual Property). According to the company’s press department, Preventive Proxy offers an original form of algorithm that can differentiate between a bot and a real person, allowing it to detect scam bots.
Image: Group-IB.
The software solution is part of a larger complex of systems designed to fight online fraud called Fraud Hunting Platform (FHP). The platform entered the market in 2020 and has already helped five major Russian banks prevent the theft of around €4 million during the first half of the year.
Preventive Proxy smart protection uses machine learning algorithms and behavioral analysis to detect malicious bot activities without blocking trusted user requests and legal bots. The system is able to work on a high-load capacity, processing tens of millions of requests to websites and mobile applications while simultaneously blocking malicious activity.
“The inclusion of a Skolkovo resident’s development in the top-10 most important Russian inventions 2020, alongside a vaccine against tuberculosis and a new form of solar energy, is recognition that Group-IB is one of the world’s leading players in the field of cybersecurity,” said Arkady Dvorkovich, the chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation. “The fact that the Preventive Proxy system has already protected 160 million users testifies to the broad potential for its adoption, most of all in the interests of regular internet users but also the banking community. Gartner international agency conferring Group-IB the status of reliable provider in the ‘Solution for Online Fraud Detection’ category speaks for itself.”
Group-IB analysts and engineers already have forty patents for inventions under their belts and sixty more patent applications in Russia, the United States, Singapore, the Netherlands, and other countries.
“Rospatent’s rating is an important event for Group-IB,” said the head of the company’s development department Alexander Batenev. “Everyone on our team has the opportunity to become an inventor, patent that idea, and gain fame and recognition not just within the company but outside as well.”
The international analytics agency Forrester has included bots in its top-5 main cyberthreats for 2020. Up to 60% of malicious bot activity, according to Group-IB data, is related to credential stuffing attacks – attacks that use stolen login information; scraping attacks – collecting data by extracting it from websites – account for 30%, while other types of fraud make up the remaining 10%.
According to Group-IB’s Pavel Krylov, the head of the online fraud prevention department, the idea to develop a technology to protect against bots came after a number of companies made requests for it. These had been victims of malicious bot activity, which had affected them financially in a significant way. Malicious actors had created bots with many different goals, making them increasingly similar to real online users; these then broke into personal accounts and gathered confidential information about users, stole authored content from websites, left thousands of spam comments and fake reviews, “clicked” ads, and “burned” budgets.
“We understood that to fight against bot intellect requires defense intellect, the battlefield being the internet,” said Mr. Krylov. “That is how Preventive Proxy came about.”