How KKday Protects Content, Reduces Costs, & Saves Time With DataDome

KKday is a leading Taiwan-based travel platform that connects travelers with authentic local experiences. Founded in 2014, KKday connects travelers to 300,000 local tours and activities in over 90 countries. Aggressive scraper bots were stealing proprietary content and using a lot of bandwidth, driving up the company’s infrastructure costs. The DataDome bot and online fraud protection solution, which integrates seamlessly with Amazon CloudFront, has enabled KKday to efficiently protect its valuable content and right-size its server infrastructure. And the KKday engineering team no longer needs to spend their time on bot mitigation.

The challenge: Bots stealing prices & driving up server costs

For the most part, 2021 was a good year for the Taiwan-headquartered travel company KKday. Having successfully navigated the COVID crisis, the platform was operating full steam ahead. Travelers were hungry for new experiences again, and the company had recently opened branches in Singapore and Thailand.

Toward the end of the year, however, there was one big cloud on the horizon for Paul Lin, Senior Cloud Architect at KKday:

“We were starting to see a lot of abnormal activity and behavior on our website,” Paul explains. “It turned out to be huge volumes of automated traffic, primarily scraper bots, which stole our product and pricing information. They took up so much bandwidth that at one point we had to increase our server capacity.”

While Paul and his team managed to stop some of the unwanted traffic with the help of their WAF, the manual process was time-consuming and slow to take effect.

The solution: Efficient bot protection, easy Amazon CloudFront integration

The time had come to invest in a specialized bot attack prevention solution. Knowing all too well how difficult it can be to separate bots from real human users, the team’s most important selection criterion was detection accuracy. KKday used the DataDome Lambda@Edge integration to deploy in minutes on Amazon CloudFront. The solution instantly provides real-time bot protection wherever end users are without the need to provision or manage infrastructure.

“We were really impressed by DataDome’s ability to accurately detect malicious activity,” says Paul. “The algorithm immediately identified a lot of bot requests that were previously unknown or unidentified.”

During KKday’s free trial, DataDome’s detection engine identified a wide range of automated activity.

The results: Protected content, cost reduction & time saving

By identifying and blocking all unwanted automated traffic in real time, DataDome now ensures that KKday’s web infrastructure serves only humans and useful bots.

Paul also appreciates how easy the tool is to manage: “The dashboard offers an excellent user experience,” he confirms. “It’s fast and easy to get an overview of our traffic, and you can clearly see the status of various requests.”

“DataDome’s detection engine is extremely fast and accurate. It efficiently keeps our prices and content safe from bots, and saves us a lot of time,” Paul concludes.