Dans Nos Cœurs Secures Its Website & Protects Its Data With DataDome

The Problem: Content Theft & Security Concerns

A place for information, communication, and services, Dans Nos Cœurs was created in 2009 in association with the French daily press.

“Our media partners send us their obituaries, which we publish on the national platform dansnoscoeurs.fr,” explains Kubra Nacar, Technical Director at Dans Nos Cœurs. “And like any classifieds website, we were targeted by content scrapers.”

As Dans Nos Cœurs is a nation-wide site that lists obituaries from all over France, competitors were typically targeting them rather than trying to scrape each individual partner site.

“This was problematic. When the media groups entrust their data to us, they don’t want to find it on third-party sites,” says Kubra. “The data theft had consequences in terms of SEO: some competitor sites were well ranked, even though the data actually belonged to us.”

Although Dans Nos Cœurs has never been the victim of a truly malicious attack, website security was also a constant concern for Kubra.

“For example, we have widgets installed on our partners’ sites that allow calls only from known IP addresses,” she says. “Via these widgets, we’ve had occasional SQL injection attempts: people have tried to put code snippets into forms on partner sites, which call our APIs.”

The Solution: Efficient, Easy-to-Install Bot Protection

When Kubra and her team decided to equip the website with a bot protection solution, they looked among the major players in the market—which at the time, in 2018, was still emerging.

“We wanted a future-proof solution that would effectively protect us against scraping and ensure that our site was secure,” she recalls. “One of the reasons DataDome appealed to us was the ease of integration.”

The team implemented the DataDome solution via the Varnish module, allowing the protection to operate at the highest level: the caching system.

“The documentation is well written and the integration was easy; we just had to implement a script on the site and on Varnish,” Kubra observes. “We could then easily disable the protection on certain URLs that are for internal use only, so that those requests wouldn’t count toward the number of requests included in our subscription.”

The Results: Secure Website, Peace of Mind

For Kubra, the main benefits of the DataDome solution are website security and not having to spend time on bot-related issues.

“We’re a fairly lean team, and it’s important for us to be able to focus on developing new features,” she says. “DataDome secures our site and works continuously without human intervention. This enables us to focus serenely on our development tasks.”

That doesn’t stop her from taking an interest in the rich insights that can be gained from the detailed data available in the DataDome dashboard.

“The dashboard provides all kinds of information: for example, if I want to see how many people have viewed a particular URL, it’s easier with DataDome than with our other analytics tools,” she comments.

“It’s also very interesting to see the requests in real time, and we’ve been able to observe attacks on the protected interfaces as they were happening. There’s a lot of hacking and DDoS going on, and the day they’re coming for us, we’ll be glad we’re protected and don’t have to spend the evening or the weekend getting the site back up. DataDome is a viable and trusted solution that protects our site very well.”