Case Study: American Big Box Retailer achieves 84% reduction in API abuse, eliminating billions of malicious requests daily, with Netacea

American Big Box Retailer Cuts API Abuse By 84%, Eliminating Billions of Malicious Requests Daily

Big Box Retailer Company, a U.S. retailer with more than 1,500 stores and over $15 billion in online revenue, was hit by massive API abuse: adversaries used custom bots to scrape product-listing APIs (price, availability, specs) at scale, generating billions of requests daily, slowing site performance and enabling rapid scalping of high-demand items like PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. They engaged Netacea to stop this automated activity and protect their ecommerce APIs.

Netacea integrated via the retailer’s CDN and deployed its AI-driven Intent Analytics bot management to analyze and act on every API request in real time, with no changes to applications. Netacea’s solution cut API requests by 84%—dropping daily traffic from nearly 14 billion to about 2 billion within weeks (over 10 billion malicious requests mitigated daily)—dramatically reducing price and content scraping, preventing scalper attacks, and lowering infrastructure requirements.