XtremeTop100.com is a global community dedicated to aggregating and promoting online gaming servers. The website, which generates more than 600,000 page views each day, is driven by user votes to rank private servers across a variety of consoles and categories.
Over the course of months, site creator John Pålsson took notice of a troubling pattern: overnight, certain servers were mysteriously flying up the rankings. With some quick research, it became clear that some server owners were paying their way to the top through fraudulent, bot-based voting.
“The quality of our service depends on real votes, by real people. Unfortunately, we discovered that bots were abusing our site, to the tune of tens of thousands of attacks getting through our system each day,” said John.
Solution
The XtremeTop100 team set out to find a more reliable solution to safeguard its site than offered by traditional CAPTCHAs. While they found temporary relief from a well-known CAPTCHA alternative, hackers quickly identified and exploited vulnerabilities in this program as well. Finally, the XtremeTop100 team turned to Arkose Labs for support.
Results
Deployed in February 2015, Arkose Labs' unique approach to web security has delivered exceptional protection for XtremeTop100. With a few simple clicks, Pålsson put an end to the bot-based pay-per-vote business model undermining his site, and has sustained a 100-percent drop in bot activity. Despite the gripes — and attempted bribes — from would-be fraudsters, FunCaptcha has effectively returned XtremeTop100 to the meritocracy it was designed to be.
“The immediate results of incorporating Arkose Labs were staggering, and we’ve seen the program hold up against a number of new attacks by determined hackers,” continued Pålsson. “Today, we can confidently reward the servers players love most, rather than those who fork over the most cash to exploit the system through bot-based votes.”
“Our team tested a number of spam filtering services, including reCAPTCHA, and found that none could stop the tide of bots — until we discovered Arkose Labs.”
— John Pålsson, XtremeTop100.com
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