Case Study: Hayneedle achieves protection of payment cardholder data, blocks price-scraping bots, and restores site performance with Distil Networks

Hayneedle uses Distil Networks to Protect Payment Cardholder Data, Price Lists, and Site Performance

Hayneedle.com (Hayneedle, Inc), a leading online retailer for indoor and outdoor home furnishings, faced an escalating bot problem: competitors scraping prices, fraudsters running automated CVV‑guessing attacks, bots competing with real customers and causing slowdowns, and skewed analytics that undermined conversion optimization and A/B testing. Brian Gress, Director of IT Systems & Governance, says the “battle‑of‑the‑bots” was consuming 20% of team resources, was only 30% effective, and was degrading the team’s quality of life.

Hayneedle deployed Distil Networks (Distil Cloud CDN) at the edge of its stack alongside F5, Instart Logic, and DYN to automatically detect, monitor (CAPTCHA) and block bad bots while preserving legitimate traffic. Distil’s Upstream HTTP Report helped diagnose 500 errors, and on August 7th, 2016 bad bot traffic spiked 10x; that day Distil showed 73% of traffic was CAPTCHA’d (17 million CAPTCHAs served, 78 solved, false positive rate .00046%). The result: superior visibility and control, reduced manual mitigation, protection of payment cardholder data and pricing, and the ability to redeploy staff to customer‑facing improvements—Distil claims automatic blocking of 99.9% of malicious traffic.

Hayneedle

Brian Gress

Director of IT Systems & Governance