Although the security operations of the modern enterprise are becoming increasingly automated thanks to the growing use of machine learning in network protection software, a human touch is still needed to pull everything into working order. That’s the reasoning behind Distil Networks Inc.’s newly announced acquisition of ScrapeSentry Inc., a professional services outfit that specializes in helping organizations counter malicious bot activity.

Its round-the-clock incident response center will provide an additional line of defense for users of the startup’s namesake traffic filtering platform, which helps protect public-facing sites and web services against non-human threats. With bots accounting for an estimated 60 percent of all online traffic, the list of unwanted activities in need of blocking is a lengthy one. Some hackers employ scripts to scan targets for known vulnerabilities they can manually exploit, while others carry out attacks on an entirely automated basis the goal of overwhelming the servers at the other end.

Recent years have seen the growing reliance of data in decision-making also give rise to a gray zone of bot traffic that consists mainly of commercial web scrapers deployed by organizations seeking to harvest competitive intelligence from their rivals’ websites. Distil Networks Inc. co-founder and chief executive Rami Essaid boasted in a statement that his company’s service is able to filter the vast majority of unwelcome bot activity, while the ScrapeSentry team will handle the rest.

The outfit can monitor the traffic to an organization’s web services for suspicious activity through an on-premise appliance and have the staffers at its support center intervene when a positive hit is detected. The team notifies the client company, assesses the scope of the damage and then helps close the breach. ScrapeSentry also offers to assist organizations with identifying the root cause of such breaches after the fact in order to prevent history from repeating itself.

Since both firms are privately held, the terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, given the fact that ScrapeSentry has offices across two continents and boasts several major customers including European budget travel giant easyJet Ltd., chances are the deal is valued in the seven figures. The funds for the purchase presumably came from the $21 million Distil raised last June.

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