Hello,

Throughout my career, I have helped top Internet brands across industries including e-commerce, travel and hospitality, media, social media, healthcare, and banking. Back in 2010, when I was a solution architect, I started focusing on web security. What quickly became apparent was that most of the traffic wreaking havoc on any website came from bots, causing stability issues and polluting critical metrics companies rely on to make business decisions. The tools available at the time to defend against such activity (mainly web application firewalls) were largely ineffective. New tools needed to be developed to deal with the problem more effectively. So, I made it my mission to help solve the problem and started building a product focusing mainly on bot detection. After all, how hard could it be?

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This started a new phase of my career as a product architect. At the time, I thought I’d work on solving this problem for a couple of years and then move on to the next challenge. I certainly managed to solve the original threat, but I did not anticipate at the time how it would evolve. More than 15 years later, I am still working on building bot management products.

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Bot management products evolved rapidly and grew in complexity to keep pace with bot evolution, becoming a must-have for protecting life online. However, existing knowledge on bots and fraud detection is fragmented and marred by misconceptions fueled by marketing pitches, myths, and sometimes outdated best practices. This makes the subject much more confusing and frustrating for web security professionals and website owners. A lack of understanding of the problem prevents them from addressing it effectively, ultimately benefiting bot operators and fraudsters.

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While building bot management products, educating security professionals became a big part of my mission. My peers, the sales force, the product support staff, and, more importantly, customers looking to use my products to protect their online business needed to be trained. Good content that goes to the heart of the problem in simple terms is hard to find and mostly nonexistent. So, I thought: maybe I should write a book! Because, after all, how hard could it be? It turns out it’s not easy, but somewhat easier and less time-consuming than building a bot management product! I published my book, The Reign of Botnets, with Wiley in 2024 and founded BotIntel Security in 2025 to provide services that educate and assist companies in successfully defining and implementing a comprehensive  strategy to manage bots and combat fraud and abuses. Although I am currently affiliated with Akamai Technologies, I have worked with and collaborated with other bot management vendors, giving me a solid understanding of the landscape with its strengths and weaknesses.

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About the content

The content reflects only my views and understanding of the state of the threat landscape, bot management, fraud detection, and AI transformation, and not those of my current or past employers. As things evolve rapidly, some content may become outdated. AI was used only to correct my grammar and spelling (Grammarly) and to generate some of the main pop art images to illustrate the blog articles (ChatGPT). The rest was produced the old-fashioned way through personal research, experience, talking to security professionals and customers, developing a product with my team to defend against bots and abuse, deep thinking, and hours at the keyboard.