Rubix Group: “With DataDome, our servers are running for our customers, not our competitors.”

Stable sites & a better user experience

Reduced use of server resources

Data protection

Retail & e-commerce Scraping

In 2017, the two groups IPH and Brammer combined to create Rubix Group, a European leader in the distribution of industrial supplies. With nearly €2.2 billion in combined revenue and more than 8,000 employees, Rubix Group operates in 23 European countries.

The group’s product range is extensive, covering all the industrial supplies, spare parts, and protective equipment its customers (of all sizes and from all sectors) could need. The group’s e-business platform is recent, but has significant growth prospects.

DataDome secures our sites. We have a shield that works continuously, and our servers are running for our customers, not our competitors.

Harold Jacquot, Digital Support & Maintenance Manager of Rubix Group

The Problem: Data Theft & Server Surcharge

Rubix Group’s products range in the millions. To build its online product catalogs, Rubix Group’s teams aggregate data from distributors, enrich them, and translate them. The catalogs therefore constitute very attractive databases—and not just for big company buyers and small business owners.

“I had already heard about bot traffic, but when I joined Rubix Group in May 2017, the topic took on a new dimension for me. The group’s sites had indeed been heavily crawled for the last few months,” says Harold Jacquot, Rubix Group’s Digital Support & Maintenance Manager.

“A large number of bots, certainly from competitors or others who wanted to access our data, were throwing countless requests at our servers and the load was awful.”

The group’s German and French sites were particularly targeted by powerful attacks, which mobilized significant technical and human resources to counter them.

“Initially, we thought it was enough to block the IP addresses the attacks were coming from, but we soon realized that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of different IP addresses. The origin was often somehow exotic with respect to our market, which is mainly European. We were attacked by servers in Saudi Arabia, in Russia … it was very difficult to counter that,” Mr. Jacquot sums up.

The Solution: DataDome Blocks Malicious Bot Traffic

The solution came about after a fortunate encounter at a trade show between Dau-Khoi Nguyen, CDO of Rubix Group, and Fabien Grenier, CEO of DataDome. Their discussion led to a follow-up meeting to examine the issue, solution deployment, and testing, after which the Rubix Group team decided: “Let’s try!”

Supported by its main technical partners, the team decided to start with the German site. It wasn’t the group’s busiest site, but it had a lot of scraper bot activity.

“Our technical environment isn’t all that simple; there’s Hybris, Linux, various platforms,” Mr Jacquot explains. “So it took a bit of back and forth between DataDome and the different partners, but by the end of July 2017, the DataDome solution was in production, and we started to detect and block bots.”

Setting up a powerful filter at the entrance to the website obviously required some adjustments.

“We had allow-listed our main partners’ IP addresses, but we ran into a particular problem on PunchOuts catalogs, or marketplaces: some customers go via third-party servers, which will contact our servers and create the connection. Initially, they were sometimes blocked, and we had to set up rules and allow-list a number of additional IP addresses,” Mr Jacquot explains.

Once this fine-tuning was completed, the DataDome solution was also deployed on the French site, the group’s largest, which was a regular target for powerful attacks.

The Result: High-Performing Sites & Protected Catalogs

The results were soon evident. Indeed, once the DataDome solution had been deployed to the French site, the team quickly noticed a sharp server load decrease. The servers were now running smoothly, and powerful attacks were becoming rare.

It’s quite interesting to watch how the DataDome algorithm is learning. Sometimes we see a peak of traffic for a few minutes, but suddenly the traffic goes back down. On the DataDome dashboard, we can see that it was indeed an attack from a new bot, not yet identified. The traffic was coming through to us, but as soon as the algorithm understood that it was an attack, it effectively blocked it.

Harold Jacquot, Digital Support & Maintenance Manager, Rubix Group

In the future, bots that are detected in this way will be automatically and immediately blocked, not only from Rubix Group’s sites, but also from the sites of all DataDome clients.

Since the intelligent part of the solution sits on DataDome’s servers, not on its customers’ servers, detection is pooled. When the DataDome algorithm identifies a new undesirable bot on a customer site, all customers automatically benefit from the knowledge, without having to perform any configuration or other manual interventions.

“Together with DataDome’s other customers, we all benefit from the algorithm’s intelligence, and we’re well protected,” confirms Jacquot, who has seen almost no new attacks in the past two months and who plans to install the solution on all the group’s sites.

“DataDome secures our sites. We have a shield that works continuously, and our servers are running for our customers, not our competitors,” he concludes.