Who goes there – human or machine?
Greenville software company Ellipsis intends to disrupt the human-bot detection space, one captcha at a time.
Captchas – human-detection tests used to deter programs and online “bots” from accessing websites – can be annoying to users, but they can also discourage real humans from websites, which can mean losing traffic and potential sales, said Ellipsis COO Matt Dunbar, also the managing director of the Upstate Carolina Angel Network. That’s where human-detection technology steps in.
“What we do is effectively a captcha test, but instead of you having to enter anything to tell the website you’re human, we do it based on data we can track around the site,” Dunbar said. “It’s a totally passive way to use algorithms to determine what looks like a human and what looks like a bot.”
Originally developed by a Georgia company, the technology simultaneously keeps from deterring human users with captchas while protecting the site from threatening or aggressively malicious bots, said Director of Account Management Ryan DeMattia, who works with Ellipsis clients on the use and implementation of the technology.
While some bots can be harmless – such as those crawling websites for search engines – others can mine websites for valuable or sensitive data, while others can overload a website’s servers with bot attacks that can shut down a website or cause physical damage to equipment, he said.
“When the traffic comes in, we can pretty much instantly say [if] it’s human or it’s suspicious,” he said, noting the technology collects up to 50 data points the moment a user accesses a site. For example, “If you’re holding a mouse in your hand, just your heartbeat and tremors in your hand are picked up … but when the pointer moves in a perfectly straight line and does not move beyond its end point, that’s a really obvious red flag.”
Around 40 to 60 percent of all Web traffic is estimated to be bot traffic, which translates in tangible ways to companies such as online advertising companies, said DeMattia. Bots waste about $10 billion in advertising spending every year through fraudulent clicks, he said.
“One of the biggest risks isn’t what the bot or hacker does on your site, it’s the technology and information they steal over time, and how it’s used over time,” he said.
While there are many others in the human detection market, most companies still require human interaction of some kind, whether it’s to drag an item into a shape or do a math problem, DeMattia said. The difference with Ellipsis, he said, is the program detects behavior and only goes through a captcha process if the behavior is suspicious.
“As it stands right now, you build a new layer of bot technology and in a matter of minutes or hours later, it’s defeated by a team of hackers,” he said. “When we move everything behind the scenes, we’re totally changing the game.”
The Ellipsis team also includes The Atlantic Partners Managing Partner Bill West as CEO; Gnoso Inc. Founder and CEO Peter Waldschmidt as vice chairman; ProActive Technology founder Andrew Kurtz as CTO; Palmetto Security Group Founder and CEO Adam Anderson as chief security officer; and 20-year business development professional Joe McKeown as the senior vice president of sales.
