Deltatech Gaming Ltd. Delivers More Secure Online Gaming with F5
India is among the top five mobile gaming markets in the world, and Deltatech Gaming Limited has been a frontrunner in the nation’s organized online gaming and entertainment industry since 2011. The company’s advantage as an early adopter has helped it establish a dominant position, and its Adda52 gaming portal is a leading skill-based poker website.
The Challenge
As part of continued risk management, Deltatech Gaming Limited strives to maintain the highest level of security on its multi-player gaming platforms, which host a variety of card games. Two of the most popular multi-player applications are Addagames for multi-gaming and Adda52 for poker, which both host regular online tournaments. These platforms face threats from bots and fake IDs that misuse or disrupt the environment.
The company uses a web application firewall (WAF) for application security and runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure smooth and safe game functioning. It needed to stay ahead of attackers and address two important risks for both the regular and real money gaming apps to ensure that players have a great experience.
“The first problem we have is that attackers try to cripple the entire ecosystem; their only intention is to bring down the ecosystem,” says Bhupalam Jayaveer, CTO of Deltatech Gaming Limited. “The secondary threat is where users misuse the ecosystem. We at Deltatech are determined to resolve any such security issues with our ever-evolving approach of taking an extra mile to ensure the safety and security of our users.”
Specifically, Deltatech Gaming Limited needed to negate any impact of fake accounts on customer winnings while preventing increases in overhead costs. The primary threat occurs when bots are introduced into the gaming environment, impairing the entire gaming ecosystem and exploiting it. Bots create automatic fake accounts that falsify the user database, resulting in false analytics and affecting the winnings-per-user data, for instance, as the overall user base does not accurately correlate with the actual players in the game.
Costs can also increase when malicious users identify loopholes in the application to, for example, create fake accounts and request online team play (OTP) 10 to 1,000 times in a minute. Efforts to respond to, prevent, or eliminate these fake accounts drain resources and thus increase overall operational costs. Finally, the company is challenged to protect sensitive customer data from crawlers and bots, which can use that data to build analytical tools without the customer’s consent.
The Solution
Deltatech Gaming Limited required an integrated security solution that can detect and eliminate fraud automatically, in real-time, while improving the overall performance of the gaming platform. The company partnered with F5 to deploy F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense to help protect applications running in its AWS cloud environment from bots.
With the F5 SaaS-based solution, Deltatech Gaming Limited has been able to identify users from inside and outside India’s geography, achieving unparalleled long-term efficacy and zero customer friction. The solution recognises fraudulent activities by identifying malicious automated traffic—with over 90% of bots found with missing tokens—and automatically tracks users with missing tokens and other traffic indicators to block fake IDs and bots. Moreover, the solution is intelligent enough to learn, improvise, and mitigate risks in real-time based on behaviors exhibited when attackers change strategy. It recognizes behavioral patterns irrespective of the user device and reacts autonomously to mitigate the risk.
Deltatech Gaming Limited’s gaming ecosystem now has three-fold protection:
The Results
Automated app security and improved compliance
Distributed Cloud Bot Defense guards the gaming apps against content scraping and fraud and helps reduce fake profiles that otherwise can result in revenue deterioration. The real-money gaming ecosystem is protected against all types of malicious bot attacks, as well as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
“It’s a single tool taking care of everything,” says Jayaveer.
Automation was an important feature. “The solution had to be autonomous, not manual, and one of the biggest ways the F5 solution helped us was with the automation that’s part of the product,” says Jayaveer. “And that’s on a real-time basis, unlike most of the products available in the market.”
Proactive bot defense
Distributed Cloud Bot Defense manages bots, mitigates automated attacks on the multi-player gaming applications, and protects the company’s gaming ecosystem from bots or fake IDs that might abuse OTPs to impact costs.
“When the attacker changes his strategy, the tool learns based on his behavior,” says Jayaveer. “That’s critical. And the platform detects it and mitigates it on a real-time basis.”
Attack insights and intelligence
Finally, the company can collect insights and build a repository of shared insights on security incidents across gaming applications. These insights can be used to increase application uptime, performance, and resilience.
With enhanced app protection, Deltatech Gaming Limited can now establish itself in the international gaming industry as a provider of great user experiences, fair-play functionalities, and improved probabilities of winning for real users.
- Bot attacks
- Fake accounts impacting costs and data analytics
- Customer data security
- Automated app security and improved compliance
- Proactive bot defense
- Attack insights and intelligence