Cybersecurity Funding: Kasada Fights Malicious Bot Traffic

Kasada, a cybersecurity company that provides the Polyform malicious botnet traffic protection solution, has raised $7 million in Series A funding. The financing comes after Kasada doubled its engineering and customer-facing teams over the past 12 months.

Organizations can use Polyform for bot detection and mitigation across enterprise web applications, according to Kasada. Polyform is built as a cluster of reverse proxies, and it helps organizations filter malicious bot traffic.

Polyform offers client fingerprinting, which assigns a "fingerprint" to each page-load request prior to browsing a website's content. In doing so, client fingerprinting helps organizations detect known and unknown bad bots, Kasada said.

In addition, Polyform provides request modeling for cyber threat research and real-time request analysis. This helps organizations learn about cyber threats and uncover patterns in bot behavior, Kasada indicated.

Are Bot Attacks on the Rise?

Polyform is one of many bot detection technologies that could become exceedingly important to global organizations, due in large part to the increasing volume of bot attacks.

For example, a reactivated version of the Emotet bot was discovered last month, according to cybersecurity company Check Point Software Technologies. Emotet began spreading spam campaigns after it was previously inactive for 90 days.

Furthermore, Trustwave, a Top 200 MSSP for 2019, identified the "Chameleon" bot earlier this year. Chameleon sent spam messages using fake Google personal or private messages, email account security alerts and other spam variants.

Demand for bot detection solutions could increase in the foreseeable future. In fact, the global bot detection solutions market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 43.2 percent between 2017 and 2025, industry analyst Kenneth Research stated.