Norauto Protects Its Prices & Boosts Its Performance With DataDome

Protected Catalogs & Prices

Optimized Performance

Reduced Attack Surface

Retail & e-commerce Scraping

Norauto is the European leader in car maintenance. With or without an appointment, Norauto centers provide multi-brand maintenance solutions to motorists in terms of maintenance, comfort, and safety. To put an end to the competitive scraping of catalogs and prices available online, Norauto’s teams tested several bot protection solutions and selected DataDome. Since 2020, DataDome protects Norauto.fr and more than 40 other sites within the Mobivia ecosystem from all bot-related threats, ensuring optimal performance and allowing security teams to focus on other tasks.

With DataDome, our e-commerce sites have robust bot protection, which reduces our attack surface and allows the security teams to focus on our other missions.

Julien Soleil, SecOps – Operational Security Officer at Norauto International

The Problem: Bots Target Prices & Threaten Performance

In the highly competitive automotive maintenance industry, the price war is fierce. As a result, the market leaders are often targeted by scrapers coming for their product catalogs and the prices associated with them.

Fortunately, Norauto’s teams didn’t wait for the problem to become urgent.

“The technology watch carried out by my predecessors had demonstrated the need to implement a bot protection solution,” explains Julien Soleil, SecOps – Operational Security Officer at Norauto International. “It was an anticipation of the threats that were getting closer to us, including DDoS attacks and competitive scraping.”

Beyond the risks associated with content and pricing data theft, scraping can also degrade the performance of e-commerce applications for legitimate customers.

“If you don’t have the appropriate solution, this threat can be somewhat invisible; there isn’t necessarily an observed impact on performance and you’re not really aware of it,” Julien comments. “It was mainly our technology monitoring that convinced our e-commerce site managers of the need to implement bot protection.”

The Solution: Tested & Approved Bot Protection

Initially, the teams tried to solve the problem through their WAF, which offered bot protection functionality in beta at the time. However, this approach quickly proved unsatisfactory.

What they needed was a solution that could detect even the most sophisticated scrapers, ideally without needing any intervention from the team.

“Detection efficiency was clearly the main criteria,” Julien confirms. “At the time of this evaluation, my colleagues conducted a number of tests. For example, they used pentests to check the robustness of the different solutions, including their ability to detect vulnerability scanners. Of the solutions we compared, DataDome was the best fit for our requirements.”

Since then, Norauto has also implemented the DataDome CAPTCHA. Initially set up on the Portuguese site, the DataDome CAPTCHA has since been extended to all the network’s sites.

“We could see that the promise of more relevant algorithms to detect scraping attacks proved to be true,” notes Julien. “The false positive rate for our legitimate customers, which was already very low, has also dropped. These are very beneficial aspects.”

The Results: Protected Data & Freed Up Time

Since 2020, DataDome has been protecting not only Norauto’s e-commerce sites, but more than 40 sites within the Mobivia ecosystem across Europe.

“The solution does the job well. With DataDome, our e-commerce sites have robust bot protection, which reduces our attack surface and allows the security teams to focus on our other missions,” says Julien, who also appreciates the quality of DataDome’s technical support.

“We have an efficient and coherent support team, whether through traditional support channels or in a very reactive way with Slack,” he notes. “They are always very responsive, which allows us to receive appropriate technical responses and solutions quickly. That’s very valuable.”

In the future, the team hopes to optimize the use of DataDome by further leveraging the detailed data available in the tool.

“We’re looking at our options for enriching the integration with SIEM-type solutions,” Julien explains. “The goal is to integrate the comprehensive DataDome logs into an observation platform, which will allow us to consolidate all of our security equipment and have even more automated postures.”