Despite spending millions of dollars on bot management, a single bot attack costs 38% of companies $500,000 or more

New survey results by Kasada, the pioneers transcending bot management by countering the human minds behind automated threats, show companies are losing revenue in the fight against malicious bot attacks. In fact, 96% of organizations lost revenue to bots in the last 12 months.

Despite spending millions of dollars on traditional bot management solutions, companies are still financially impacted by bot attacks. According to the survey, 38% of respondents estimate that a single bot attack costs their organization $500,000 or more, up from 25% in last year’s survey. Plus, half (50%) of organizations lost 10% or more of revenue due to bot-driven account fraud within the last year, up from 40% of organizations last year.

“The rising costs of automated attacks are due to the fact that adversaries are getting more advanced while organizations are still relying on outdated solutions that are slow to evolve, easy to evade, and difficult to manage,” said Sam Crowther, founder and CEO of Kasada. “In fact, only 19% of this year’s respondents said their anti-bot solutions remained effective a year after initial deployment.”

Kasada’s third annual report surveyed security and technology professionals at companies that are already using bot management. The results further revealed the following trends:

CAPTCHAs are detrimental to the customer experience and likely cause lost sales.

• 77% believe the customer experience on websites would be improved by the elimination of CAPTCHAs.
• Around 4 in 5 (81%) agree that their customers would have an improved and more fair user experience if they weren’t competing against bots.

Bots are becoming smarter and more frequent.

• Nearly 4 in 5 (79%) say that bots are becoming more sophisticated and difficult for their security tools to detect.
• Nearly two-thirds (63%) say their companies experienced a bot attack within the last 12 months.

As AI-enabled bots can now complete CAPTCHAs more quickly than humans and make it easier to launch automated attacks, AI driven-fraud is a top concern.

• 90% say their executive team is concerned about bot attacks and AI-driven fraud.
• 89% believe AI-driven fraud will present a threat to their organization over the next 12 months.

“Bots are continuously evolving to evade traditional bot management solutions, making defense a difficult, expensive effort for companies,” said Crowther. “So much money and time are wasted on static defenses that don’t protect companies against these threats; so Kasada has taken a different approach. Our proactive, dynamic platform continually protects against new threats, detering adversaries and providing a frictionless experience for consumers.”

All-in-one UGC platform improves and expands in booming UGC marketplace

JoinBrands, the leading influencer marketing and user-generated content (UGC) platform, has unveiled new updates, optimizing the system for the upcoming holiday season. Aimed at helping brands capitalize on the fast-growing UGC marketplace, JoinBrands offers unparalleled value in terms of affordability and quality.

Since its launch in late 2022, JoinBrands has seen tremendous growth, registering over 126,000 content creators and collaborating with more than 10,000 brands. Impressively, it reported over $2.5M in payouts to creators and has overseen more than 40,000 UGC collaborations between brands and creators.

Hunter Cowan, a JoinBrands UGC creator, said she turned her hobby into a full-time business through the JoinBrands platform. "It has changed my entire life as a family dynamic. I'm making a substantial amount of money that allows me to homeschool my six daughters and earn a great side income that supports my family."

JoinBrands' platform allows brand owners and marketers to quickly identify, engage, and collaborate with an extensive network of seasoned UGC creators. "Our goal is to help businesses simplify UGC and save time and money," said JoinBrands co-founder and CEO Leo Limin. "We continuously innovate to streamline the entire UGC management process, allowing brands of all sizes to effectively execute their UGC strategies."

Platform Highlights:

• Fast, Easy and Free Onboarding: New users can join and post a job in just a few clicks. It's free to sign up, free to create a campaign, and free to see and choose from creators and portfolios. Brands only pay when a creator accepts the job.
• Content Creator Certification: JoinBrands upholds strict quality checks for creators, rating them up to a level three certification. Every content creator undergoes a screening process that includes submitting a UGC example for each category.
• Enhanced Creator Profiles: A new feature to instantly view creator portfolios, inclusive of their pitch videos, work samples, and reviews.
• Diverse Campaign Options: From videos, how-to's, and unboxing reels, to product selfies and demos, with prices starting as low as $15.
• Integrated Marketing Tools: Content rights and whitelisting are managed within the platform. Brands can easily promote content across TikTok, Instagram Reels, Amazon Shopping, YouTube Shorts and more.
• Secure Payments: A streamlined payment process ensuring both brands and creators experience hassle-free transactions.

"We've really come to appreciate JoinBrands in our marketing arsenal. It's not only affordable but also super easy to navigate," said Jason Pratt, CEO of Bluechip Brands, which owns a portfolio of direct-to-consumer brands including JoySpring Vitamins. "We've seen our conversion rates go up. Plus, we can play around with social ads without breaking the bank on big influencers. It's been a game-changer."

Zuar Platform Helps ThoughtSpot Customers Maximize the Value of their Data, Launch Embedded Analytics Faster

Latest Catchpoint Platform update adds capabilities that accelerate time to detection, improve automation capabilities, and further expand its already leading Global Observability Network.

Catchpoint, the innovation leader in Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM), launches new features that cement its position as the platform to help organizations achieve Internet Resilience.

The Internet relies on Catchpoint, and we are extremely proud to introduce new capabilities and products that demonstrate ongoing innovation towards our goal of making the Internet better for everyone.

Internet Sonar​ – Catchpoint Internet Sonar answers the question: "Is it me or something else?" This addition to the Catchpoint IPM Platform provides simple, intelligent, trustworthy, Internet health information at-a-glance so you can get ahead of productivity or experience-impacting 3^rd-party incidents. Internet Sonar uses data from the world’s largest, independent, active observability network to monitor hundreds of the Internet’s most popular services for outages. The result is an AI-powered, real-time, interactive status report that can be displayed via an interactive map, a dashboard widget, or accessed by any system via API. Internet Sonar can ensure a resilient Internet across all these dependencies and deliver exceptional digital experiences for your customers to drive business success.

"Here at The Washington Post, we recently had a situation where several alerts were firing. We couldn't pinpoint root cause and our cloud provider's status was all green,” said a Technical Architect from the Washington Post. “After troubleshooting for nearly thirty minutes, we determined that the issue was with another critical service provider on which we rely. If Internet Sonar had been in place, it would have proactively flagged the outage and helped us discover root cause much more rapidly."

Catchpoint Tracing – Catchpoint Tracing solves the problem of complex, large, distributed environments – used for modern application delivery – impacting your customers’ digital experience and, ultimately, business revenue. It helps operations teams achieve Internet Resilience by extending the reach of IPM combining deep visibility into the Internet Stack to visualize request journeys through backend application components with code-level visibility into cloud-first applications to understand application behavior and ensure application health and performance. With Catchpoint Tracing, businesses can give customers the fast, resilient experiences they love and expect. Catchpoint’s IPM platform is the only one in the world that combines deep visibility into the internet, an outside-in perspective of digital experience, all the way through to the application and its dependencies. Unlike APM, which monitors from the inside out, IPM is effective in ensuring great experiences with a holistic view. Catchpoint Tracing provides full Open Telemetry support enabling an organization to easily integrate the data as it requires. Tracing provides full Open Telemetry support enabling an organization to easily integrate the data as it requires.

Full Open Telemetry Support – From the beginning, Catchpoint has embraced open standards and direct access to monitoring data. The Catchpoint IPM platform webhook data API provides detailed data directly from any of our nodes to any customer’s data warehouse for template-based consumption – and has done so before Open Telemetry existed. This data is real-time, granular, and of a higher quality than what most monitoring tools offer. Catchpoint has also always had the unique ability to add custom headers to our HTTP monitors, allowing them to aggregate data in ways that can be followed and traced. As a result, Catchpoint is exceptionally cost-effective when it comes to integration with other systems.

Enterprise Light Nodes – Organizations that rely on Catchpoint’s IPM platform now have access to a new lightweight node that can be deployed broadly to achieve increased visibility while requiring fewer resources. Able to run on a variety of environments (including Cisco routers, switches, and other devices) and scaling to hundreds or thousands of locations, the Enterprise Light Node fulfills a critical need for connectivity at sites like retail stores, branch locations, satellite offices, or any other remote area not covered by an enterprise node. The result is cost-effective monitoring from where it matters.

Traceroute ECN​ – Catchpoint has enhanced its Network Experience solution with Traceroute ECN Internet Congestion Detection and Avoidance. Extremely lag-sensitive applications like AR/VR, streaming, gaming, Metaverse, autonomous vehicles, etc., are becoming increasingly popular, and demand for them is only growing. To ensure users' network experience, Catchpoint now supports Traceroute ECN, which provides full visibility into decision-making for traffic routing around network congestion. The result is lower latency and smoother real-time applications. This support is unique to Catchpoint, highlighting its innovative leadership and forward-looking vision. Details of this technology can be found at RFC9330, RFC9331 Accurate ECN, and IETF L4S - Low Latency Low Loss Scalable Throughput - L4S. ​

Terraform Support – Catchpoint integration is now available in the HashiCorp Terraform registry to simplify integration into DevOps environments and integrate IPM into the innovation process, giving SRE teams visibility into the real-world experience their software delivers to users as well as performance and availability monitoring for the tools they rely on to do their job. Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that enables users to safely and predictably provision and manage infrastructure in any cloud. With the Catchpoint Terraform provider, users can manage Web, API, Transaction, DNS, SSL, BGP, Traceroute, and Ping tests with minimum configurations. This makes it easier than ever before for developers to integrate Catchpoint data.

Sub-second Network Testing ​– Some outages last just a few seconds at a time, making them difficult to detect using relatively infrequent tests. Only Catchpoint allows you to monitor the network continuously at a sub-second level to detect intermittent network issues faster. This makes Catchpoint’s Network Experience solution more effective when troubleshooting intermittent, hard-to-pinpoint network issues.

Webpage Waterfall Compare – Identifying the root cause of website performance problems can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Loading a webpage in a browser can trigger hundreds of HTTP requests, with dependencies and relationships that are often unclear. Site reliability engineers (SREs) and development teams must quickly identify what changed, but until now, SREs haven’t had the same comparison tools they’ve used while coding to easily compare what changed on browser renderings before and after the problem. With this release, only Catchpoint now provides the ability to compare browser rendering waterfall results of up to four web tests in full detail, side-by-side. This enhances the Website Experience solution to help companies find and fix problems quickly, lowering MTTR and reducing the impact of Internet performance problems.

Zoom and Microsoft Teams Monitoring - Catchpoint’s Workforce Experience solution has been enhanced for today’s hybrid workforce. Organizations rely on collaboration solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom to facilitate the work of remote employees. We have extended our IPM solution capabilities to include full visibility for both of these key collaboration solutions.

Global Observability Network Improvements – Only Catchpoint enables you to monitor from where it matters for your organization, your customers, and your employees. We are constantly growing our footprint and vantage points, although we already have the largest network globally. Since our May launch, we have added more than 60 new nodes across the US, Canada, Israel, Germany, Poland, Qatar, Japan, India, Singapore, Sweden, Australia, and Italy, covering Cloud, Backbone, Last Mile and Wireless, bringing our total network vantage points to over 2500. We have also added an additional 10 BGP feeds across 8 countries to bring our total coverage on BGP to over 1800 BGP peers and ASNs, providing even further real-time global BGP visibility against hijacks or manipulation.

“I am particularly excited about Catchpoint’s Internet Sonar because it offers a uniquely cost-effective way for IT teams to radically reduce MTTR by determining whether an issue is due to an issue in their Internet Stack or something else happening in the Internet,” said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint. “With outages costing up to tens of thousands of dollars per minute, our customers will be able to save millions with this at-a-glance information.”

RedTrack, a leading provider of analytics and media-buying automation solutions for e-com and DTC brands, is thrilled to announce the release of its Customer Journey Reporting. This exciting development is here to unlock full-funnel visibility for advertisers who invest in multiple ad channels and struggle to attribute revenue results to the relevant channels, campaigns, or ads.

Understanding the customer journey is essential for the success of the e-commerce business today. RedTrack's Customer Journey Reports offer a comprehensive view of each customer's interaction with the web store, from their initial ad click to the successful purchase.

By analyzing the journey of the customer to the conversion event, advertisers can make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing campaigns.

Customer Journey reporting is not the only feature developed by the RedTrack team to contribute to efficient advertising for e-commerce.

It becomes a new addition to the RedTrack platform, which is used by e-commerce and affiliate media buyers because of its advanced ad tracking and conversion attribution toolset:

• Real-time ad spend sync with all major channels like Meta, Google, Youtube, Bing, etc., provided by in-built API integrations;
• 100% accurate revenue synchronization with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and other e-commerce platforms;
• Advanced Automation Rules that help reduce ad waste and improve ROAS, together with Ad management straight from the RedTrack UI.

Introducing the Customer Journey report is one of the significant steps to make RedTrack a complete solution for e-commerce advertisers, allowing them to make key decisions and actions through a single platform.

Vlad Zhovtenko, CEO and co-founder of RedTrack, comments: "RedTrack team is driven by the vision to reduce the number of screens and UIs media-buyers have to juggle in their daily operations. The combination of robust reporting, full-funnel visibility, and built-in ad management automation brings us closer to our mission."

RedTrack's Customer Journey Reporting is available with all e-com subscriptions at RedTrack. For the best deal, seize an early Black Friday sale. This promo is here to help e-commerce advertisers set up accurate analytics & automation before the holiday rush starts.

IZEA Worldwide, Inc., the premier provider of influencer marketing technology, data, and services for the world’s leading brands and agencies, is proud to announce an innovative integration with Google’s Gmail, enhancing the functionality of IZEA Flex, its next-generation influencer marketing platform. The new integration is designed to improve, maintain and streamline relationships between marketers and creators, making it easier for brands and agencies to scale and manage influencer programs.

The Gmail integration in IZEA Flex allows marketers to opt-in to a system that automatically associates emails sent to creators with their corresponding contact records in Flex. This feature makes emails visible and searchable within the creator's contact record, which can be connected to other data objects in the Flex platform for added context. For instance, marketers can associate emails with a campaign, creator payment, or content to obtain information that is relevant to their work.

"This is a game-changer for marketers aiming to build and maintain relationships with creators, whether they are within the IZEA network or beyond," said Ted Murphy, Founder and CEO of IZEA. "This integration allows the seamless association of communications with all elements within the Flex platform, bringing more effective and streamlined management, tracking, and analysis of influencer relationships and campaigns."

“Our commitment to providing exceptional value is at the heart of IZEA's software philosophy,” continued Murphy. “As a testament to this commitment, we continue to add new features to IZEA Flex at a blistering pace — without raising prices on our users. Flex is hands down the best value in influencer marketing, and we will aggressively continue adding new features for our customers.”

Gmail integration is included in IZEA Flex’s Starter and Power plans at no additional cost. Marketers can license IZEA Flex starting at as little as $130 per month.