Pneus Online Eliminates Bot Traffic & Frees Up Hours Each Day With DataDome

The Problem: Time-Consuming Management of Malicious Traffic

Online tire sales is a highly competitive sector, and some companies will stop at nothing to monitor the competition and position themselves as well as possible. The Pneus Online IT team knew that about half of their traffic was being generated by malicious bots, mainly scrapers.

“We were monitoring our server logs every day, and we were blocking high volumes of requests,” explains Pneus Online’s CTO. “But we had limited means at our disposal, particularly due to dynamic IPs. We’re very careful not to block real customers, and an IP address used by a malicious actor today could be assigned to a human tomorrow. That’s why we couldn’t afford to block them.”

For a long time, this process for handling automated traffic was still reasonably effective, albeit time-consuming. The two people on the team responsible for analyzing logs, diagnosing problems, and taking the necessary action were spending an hour or two on it each day.

Gradually, however, the scraper bot traffic became increasingly more intrusive and problematic. Pneus Online also underwent multiple denial-of-service attacks, including one that took the platform down for a period of time.

“That last event really motivated us to look for a solution,” the CTO admits. “We had reached our limits, and it was no longer possible to manage everything without the right resources. We needed a tool that could detect this type of threat and—most importantly—take action automatically, based on the type of attack.”

The Solution: Ultra-Accurate Detection Minimizes False Positives

When choosing a solution, detection quality was by far the most important criterion.

“We paid a lot of attention to how reliably the different solutions identified bad bots, because we didn’t want to end up with a tool that would protect against malicious requests, while also blocking lots of real customers,” says the CTO, who didn’t want to rush into choosing a solution and preferred to take the time to properly evaluate all options.

Some tools generated too many false positives—and worse, continued to let bad bot traffic through—because their blocking decisions were based on overly approximate rules. Others offered only demos without a direct link to the platform and Pneus Online’s traffic, which made it difficult to evaluate them. The team appreciated the possibility and ease of testing the DataDome solution on its own traffic, without making any changes to their architecture or technical infrastructure.

“The free trial period really helped us make a decision, because we could see firsthand what DataDome could provide in terms of results and protection,” states the CTO. “The information provided for each request, good or bad, is extremely precise, and the reports are highly detailed. Before the installation, we were a little skeptical about the reported false positive rate, but it really is that low. The detection is highly accurate.”

The Results: Traffic Reduced by Half & Time Freed Up

Since the protection was activated, more than half of Pneus Online’s traffic has been eliminated.

“Because we have our own hardware, our costs are not directly linked to the resources being used, but we’ll still benefit in the medium to long term,” says the CTO. “Using fewer resources to serve unwanted traffic will save us—or allow us to postpone—the purchase of additional hardware. The protection also saves us a lot of time. I glance at the dashboard every day, especially in the morning to see what happened the day before, but I almost never have to intervene anymore.”

He is happy with how effective the detection is, particularly how it blocks all the bad bots without adversely affecting human visitors.

“Every day, I see that DataDome detects massive crawls that go through residential connections,” he explains. “For us, it was impossible to block these types of attacks, because there was always the risk of blocking a potential customer in the future. DataDome is able to block just the malicious request, and if the next day the IP is assigned to someone who wants to place an order on our site, that’s not a problem.”