PRESS RELEASE

ATLANTA, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Pramana, an Internet fraud protection company formed out of Georgia Institute of Technology, today launched two new technologies, BotAlert(TM) and BotBlock(TM), to help website owners detect and eliminate fraudulent and costly bot traffic on their websites.

A well-known problem among website owners and programmers, bots commit fraud, misuse websites, and steal information, straining valuable IT resources, costing money, and annoying IT professionals and customers alike. They also post links on blogs, disrupt travel and ticketing websites, steal content from sites, and cause loss of data.

Free daily reports detail how much online traffic is human vs. automated

To help IT professionals detect the presence of bots, Pramana offers BotAlert, a free utility that reports with certainty the level of bot traffic on a site. BotAlert can be implemented invisibly and easily on any interactive page of a site including a registration page, comment page, contact us page, message board or log-in page. BotAlert generates daily reports that detail website traffic, providing a breakdown of human and non-human traffic. With this intelligence, companies are empowered to better understand and ultimately remediate potential threats.

"BotAlert is like Google Analytics for bot traffic, and it's free, easy, robust and very useful," said David Crowder, CEO, Pramana. "Whether it's a direct cost, loss of reputation or wasted resources, bots impact the bottom line. By identifying the scope and nature of their problem, website owners can improve utilization of their website, increase customer retention, and stop online abuses."

CAPTCHA-replacement, bot prevention technology keeps bots out, customers in

For website owners struggling to combat bots and reduce customer abandonment, Pramana offers BotBlock,the first technology of its kind that is neither CAPTCHA - swirled letters visitors must type before registering on a website - nor a reputation system. More effective than CAPTCHAs, this lightweight tool is based on proprietary algorithms that detect bot activity in real-time. Unlike CAPTCHAs, BotBlock is invisible to the customer, and has zero negative impact on their online experience. BotBlock responds in any number of ways specified by the website owner to prevent a bot from misusing the website, including blocking them outright or feeding them false data.

CAPTCHAs kill web traffic by up to 10%, costly to businesses

According to Internet security technology company McAfee, Inc., botnets have become the biggest thorn in the side of cybersecurity professionals during the last six years and are the essential infrastructure used by cybercriminals for launching cyberattacks from data exfiltration and espionage, to spam and distributed denial of service.

Many websites use CAPTCHAs to combat bots, but studies show that three to 10 percent of legitimate website visitors will abandon the site when presented with a CAPTCHA. In addition, CAPTCHAs increasingly fail to filter out automated processes, which have been reengineered specifically to overcome them.

"We tried the CAPTCHA route on our registration pages, but they were utterly useless and frustrated our customers," said Johan Kowall, Director of Technical Operations with MFG.com, the world's largest global sourcing marketplace for the manufacturing industry. "The last thing we want to do is lose customers during the registration process. The beauty of Pramana's technology is that the end user doesn't even know it's running, and the accuracy with which it blocks bots is very unique and cutting-edge. The report gives you an easy-to-read breakdown of traffic, IP addresses and the corresponding information they submitted, for easy identification of bots."

Pricing and Availability

Both BotAlert and BotBlock are available for download at http://www.pramana.com. BotAlert is free, and BotBlock ranges from $19.99 to $299.99 per month, depending on the level of monthly transactions. An automated demonstration of BotBlock is available at http://www.pramana.com/resources/botblock-demo/.

About Pramana

Pramana is an Internet fraud protection company that provides website owners with innovative technologies that detect and eliminate bots. The company was founded in 2007 out of the Georgia Institute of Technology in response to the growing need to combat hackers, bots and harmful malware designed to commit fraud on websites. Pramana offers a range of products designed to distinguish human visitors from automated processes, enabling customers to halt fraudulent use of their websites. Using patented technology, Pramana's products set a new standard in bot detection and elimination that integrate seamlessly and are completely invisible to legitimate visitors. For more information, visit www.pramana.com.