Distil Networks acquires Sentor’s ScrapeSentry to monitor malicious bot activity

Security company ScrapeSentry, which has offices in Sweden and the UK, has been acquired by US bot detection firm Distil Networks. No financial details were revealed.

ScrapeSentry, a spin-off of Sweden’s Sentor founded in 2006 and headquartered in Boston, provides anti-scraping services for clients to prevent the extraction of data from their websites. Under the acquisition, the company will see its team of security analysts carry out real-time threat analysis of malicious bot activity as well as post-incident reporting. It already counts companies like Ladbrokes and EasyJet among its clients.

According to Distil Networks, bots account for nearly 60% of web traffic and are often used by hackers and fraudsters to carry out different attacks and online fraud techniques. The firm, which closed a $21 million Series B round last summer, offers bot detection and threat intelligence solutions that monitor a site’s traffic and builds a fingerprint of each individual connection so companies can separate the bots from legitimate traffic.

“Together with Distil we will have a platform that we can use to provide protection for a broader audience and all customers will benefit from the unmatched strength of the joint development and research teams,” said Martin Zetterlund, CEO of ScrapeSentry.

“Distil’s technology is built on machine learning and catches 99.9 percent of the bad guys,” added Distil Networks CEO Rami Essaid. “By adding ScrapeSentry’s experts to our team, and a human element to our solution, we are getting closer to closing that point one percent gap.”