Case Study: Whitepages achieves data protection and stops form spam with Distil Networks

Whitepages Protects Online Data and Blocks Form Spam Using Distil

Whitepages, a leading directory and identity verification service with more than 50 million monthly users, faced aggressive data scraping and premium-content theft. Their homegrown, IP-based bot solution generated frequent false positives, drove daily customer complaints, triggered costly third‑party API calls, and pushed infrastructure costs up as malicious query load degraded the user experience.

Whitepages deployed Distil Networks’ appliance to apply per-user, per-request detection, rate‑limiting and CAPTCHA instead of blunt IP blocks. The result: comment spam and scraping were stopped, false positives were eliminated, DevOps and customer‑service effort fell by about 20%, third‑party and legal costs were reduced, and production query load and infrastructure expenses decreased while site performance improved.

WhitePages

Michael Bradshaw

IT Operations Manager