Yesterday I attended the Akamai State of the Internet Webinar. The first 13 slides were full of broadband adoption rates along with other statistical information about high speed internet usage along with mobile information, etc. What I found most interesting was from slide 14 onward.

The news over the past several weeks has been about Wikileaks and anyone in the web space has heard about high traffic attacks on banks, E-commerce sites and/or any transactional based account sites. NuCaptcha posted yesterday about the move by Facebook to use facial recognition as a captcha to help bot attacks. While the attacks themselves can cause a lot of mayhem for the website/portal owners what is most interesting is the resulting cost to the business as a result of these attacks.

*page 14, Akamai State of the Internet Webinar Jan 26/2011

Lost revenues as a result of the high traffic attacks is the real pain retailers and some say this is only going to get worse. $3M in lost revenues for each retailer over the short holiday season is significant revenue. Akamai has a great security infrastructure that they have built to help ward off these attacks and limit the number of bots that actually make it to the application portal itself.

What is interesting for me from a captcha point of view, is that companies like Akamai with their security stack are still working with application delivery systems using captcha technologies like recaptcha which only provides a 75% usability rating and has been proven to be “hacked”. This means that even after this entire security stack has been built and set up for a retailer, 1 in 4 customers who reach the application are failing to be able to sign into the application due to a bad captcha technology. How much lost revenue does that equate to? In addition, since recaptcha has been proven to be hacked the attacks make their way through the recaptcha technology and they stall the entire transactional process causing more revenue loss and unhappy customers. A great example of this is ticketmaster where anyone can simply download a recaptcha bot breaker and do what they like in the application.

http://ticketmasterbot.wordpress.com/

The Akamai webinar itself can be found at http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet while the slide deck can be found at http://wwwns.akamai.com/soti/webinar01262011.pdf