AllSaints tackles malicious bots with Netacea machine learning tech

Global fashion brand AllSaints has selected bot management company Netacea to supply machine learning tools for the detection of malicious bot-based activity and cyber attacks. 

Having started life as a small fashion brand from East London in 1994, AllSaints has grown into a global brand with stores, franchises, concessions and outlets across 26 countries. As such, it has also garnered a strong web presence, which in turn means it presents a tempting target for malicious activity, notably fraudulent and fake traffic from bot visitors. 

Such bots can be used to power credential stuffing attacks and scrape data from customers as they enter their details, something that sites like AllSaints, with heavy e-commerce elements, are finding increasingly common.

AllSaints had been using a manual bot mitigation process to filter out the fake website visits from the real ones, but by partnering with Netacea the fashion brand gains access to the latter’s Intent Analytics engine, which can automatically distinguish bot activity from that of humans. 

“We had seen indications of potential bot activity and, with cyber-attacks hitting the headlines every day, we refused to take any chances when it came to cybersecurity,” said James Reid, AllSaints’ global technology director, noting that the company reviewed various bot protection providers and selected Netacea due in part to its “accessible” user interface. 

By taking an automated approach to bot management, AllSaints should have a better idea of the threats targeting its online services, and free up capacity for its IT team to concentrate on other operations.

The partnership with Netacea is part of a major digital transformation programme at AllSaints, which has already seen it move from Rackspace to Google Cloud to help upscale its IT operations.

While AllSaints is not a long-standing brand, having only been in existence for 26 years, this partnership with Netacea does indicate how all manner of companies, fledgeling or ancient, can stand to gain something from digital transformation.

AllSaints’ approach to digital transformation is also noteworthy because not only is it going down the somewhat predictable ‘move to the cloud’ route, it has also worked to refine a specific part of its operations with modern technology, in this case, machine learning.