SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 16, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via PRWEB - Distil Networks, Inc., the global leader in bot detection and mitigation, today announced the findings from performing a basic bot test to the top sites in the world, in conjunction with the Online Trust Alliance's (OTA) Annual Online Trust Audit. Now in its 7th year, the OTA Audit and Honor Roll, powered in part by Distil Networks, recognizes companies that adopt best practices in consumer protection, security and privacy. The audit evaluated the top websites in ecommerce, financial services, media, social and top U.S. government agencies.
While overall 44 percent of companies audited by OTA qualified for the Honor Roll this year, 46 percent still failed in one or more categories putting consumers and their data at risk. Distil Networks tested each site's ability to defend against a basic bot attack. Bots are the key culprits behind web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, brownouts, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud. Bots tax IT security and web infrastructure teams across the globe and their variety, volume and sophistication wreak havoc across online operations big and small.
Distil Networks sent 50 bot requests into each website hitting one link per second with a default user agent, meaning the bot did not use any obfuscation methods such as disguising itself as a real browser or valid user agent. If the site blocked the bot within 25 page requests then they passed the test.
"These are the top websites in the world and we performed the most basic, easiest to detect bot test," said Distil Networks CEO and co-founder Rami Essaid. "These bots can be performing a long list of nefarious acts on your website. Failing this test is equivalent to allowing the most basic bot threat to march right into your Web infrastructure."
Key Findings
● Social media websites performed the worst of all with a dismal 66 percent pass rate against the simple bot test.
● Over 30 percent of the top 50 media websites were not able detect and block the most basic bot.
● Financial services performed well against basic bot tests, with 98 percent of the top 100 FDIC websites passing.
● Over 10% of the top 500 Internet retailers could not detect the most basic bot.
To view the Online Trust Alliance's full honor roll list, click here https://otalliance.org/HonorRoll
Do you know if your company website might have a bot problem? Check for free to see if your website is able to thwart basic bot attacks that can scrape text, images and contact information, as well as identify Web pages that contain username and login screens, a search function and basic web infrastructure data such as IP address, at Canyoubot.me.
About Distil Networks
Distil Networks, the global leader in bot detection and mitigation, is the first easy and accurate way to identify and police malicious website traffic, blocking 99.9% of bad bots without impacting legitimate users. Distil protects against web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud. Slash the high tax that bots place on your internal teams and web infrastructure by outsourcing the problem to the team with a maniacal focus on blocking malicious bots. For more information on Distil Networks, visit us at http://www.distilnetworks.com or follow @DISTIL on twitter.
This article was originally distributed on PRWeb. For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/06/prweb12790841.htm