New websites are being created every day. In fact, a survey from Netcraft showed that in a day, around 140,000 websites are launched. This survey was taken in 2012, so the number will be even higher today.
However, as the number of websites increase, so increases the risk of hacking. Security for websites is a major concern in today’s world, and companies are willing to invest millions to secure their precious websites. One such risk is web scraping.
Web scraping refers to the process of copying the HTML and CSS codes of a website with the help of specific software called bots. Now, web scraping isn’t entirely illegal. For example, Google bots constantly visit websites in order to list them in the search engine. If the bots were not allowed to visit, then your website won’t be able to appear in the search results.
However, web scraping can be used for illegal activities as well. For example, certain hackers send tons of these bots to scrape a website, thus keeping the servers busy and hence preventing other potential customers from visiting the website. This is known as Denial of Service Attack.
Also, many people use these bots to copy contents from others websites and paste it in theirs. One needs to protect his or her website from such attacks.
Shield Square is one of those companies, which is trying hard to protect our websites from these web scrapers. The founders of the company Vasanth Kumar Gopalakrishnan, Jyoti Kakatkar, Srikanth Konijeti, Rakesh Thatha, and Pavan Thatha had only one aim in mind when they formed this company – to help online portals shield themselves from web scraping by rival websites. They were founded in 2013, and they have improved a lot since then.
They are still finding new innovative ways to distinguish real people from these bots and block the latter. Their technology has already been approved by some of the top researchers in this field. They have earlier built a pattern-based Two Factor Authentication system, which has made them quite famous as a company. It has not yet been patented though.
The technology is extremely simple to understand. When someone visits a website, he or she has to complete some pattern which is extremely easy for a human being, but not so for a bot. When the bot fails, it is either shown fake data or blocked, while the human being is allowed to view the contents of the website. This technology helps Shield Square to identify and block web scrapers in real time, which is an incredible feat. In fact, the system actually gets smarter over time, so that it can handle more complicated threats in the future.
They have also successfully raised funding of 2 crore INR from 15 investors. They have been featured in several renowned tech portals and magazines such as The Economic Times, TechCircle and ProgrammableWeb.
This company has shown us that one doesn’t need anything fancy to be successful. A proper plan and determination with an aim to help mankind is all it takes to build a successful enterprise.