Betafi Blocks Bots on Launch Day with Paraxial.io

Betafi is a user research platform that makes it easy to capture and make sense of customer feedback sessions. User interviews, usability testing, and sharing business insights are all supported. Built on Elixir and Phoenix, the team at Betafi was preparing to launch on Product Hunt, and wanted to ensure the big launch day was not disrupted by bot attacks.

Safeguarding the Launch With Paraxial.io

A few weeks before the launch, Betafi’s Co-Founder and CTO Ethan Sherbondy decided to use Paraxial.io to safeguard their primary application. Setup took only a few hours, compared with the days or weeks required of older legacy products. Finally, the launch day arrived. Betafi experienced a surge in traffic, with new signups from around the world. Malicious bots also took notice, sending over 1,000 spam registration attempts to Betafi, which were blocked by Paraxial.io.

Why would someone attempt to create thousands of spam accounts? A likely reason is to perform credit card fraud. Criminals amass hundreds of stolen card numbers, then use bots to register thousands of fake accounts, with the intent of making a small purchase on each stolen card, to determine which cards can be used for further fraud. Dealing with these attacks is expensive work for new companies, and puts a damper on the excitement of launch day.

Betafi was able to block this attack using Paraxial.io. The team was able to celebrate a highly successful launch, while Paraxial.io quietly worked in the background, stopping an attacker from disrupting this important milestone.

Our team at Betafi was able to quickly integrate Paraxial within a few hours in the weeks leading up to our public launch, and we’re happy to report that Paraxial has already protected us from several botnet attacks over the past month.

Michael has also been incredibly generous with his time, sharing helpful resources to lift awareness within the broader Elixir and software ecosystem about how to build robust systems from the outset to mitigate risks around common attack vectors from credential stuffing to DDoS, and more. He’s also been very receptive and responsive to quickly action feedback around the core Paraxial offering.

Ethan Sherbondy Co-Founder & CTO, Betafi

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