Acquisition of Israeli startup will help merchants address surge of bot attacks to improve customer experience and protect the bottom line

Forter, the Trust Platform for digital commerce, announced the acquisition of Immue, a bot detection company based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Forter’s first acquisition will not only strengthen the company’s existing fraud management capabilities but add Immue’s domain-specific bot expertise.

Bots are used by the most sophisticated fraud operations to monitor and automate purchases from merchant sites. In fact, it’s frequently automated systems competing against legitimate customers for the most sought-after items. Headline-grabbing bots often target limited stock drops or short time frame sales – most common in the ticketing and footwear/apparel industries – where merchants must balance high demand with low-quantity. Forter’s data found that these merchants face 5-6x more bot attacks than their counterparts.

“Successful bot attacks leave the world’s biggest brands exposed to account takeovers, service disruptions, reputational damage, loss of consumer trust and more,” said Michael Reitblat, chief executive officer and co-founder, Forter. “Immue’s cutting-edge technology will enable us to bring bot detection to the full customer lifecycle – stopping the most sophisticated bots and human fraudsters from account creation to checkout. We’re thrilled to welcome Shira, Amit and the entire team to Forter.”

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“We’re looking forward to bringing our powerful teams together to fight fraud and build trust.”

The Immue acquisition will expand Forter’s fraud prevention solution stack by improving its bot detection capabilities:

• Strengthening Forter’s core fraud management offering – Bot attacks are accelerating and becoming more sophisticated. The Immue team will join Forter’s cyber research group, improving its ability to detect device and connection manipulations.
• Advancing Forter’s bot detection layer – Customers now require domain-specific knowledge and higher-throughput, low-latency decisions. Immue provides a bot mitigation layer, an undefeatable Captcha, the ability to regulate bots during hype and flash sales, and more – all capabilities Forter will build into its core platform.

While the vast majority of bot traffic is damaging to merchants and their customers, Immue’s innovative technology allows businesses to filter out the most sophisticated attacks and authorize only certain bot-enabled transactions. For example, a merchant with excess inventory may create a policy that allows bots to purchase a certain number of items to eliminate the overstock and avoid lower gross margins.

Immue was founded in 2021 by chief executive officer Shira Itzhaki, chief technology officer Amit Yossi Siva Levi and Omri Meliches to help merchants detect and prevent the most sophisticated bot attacks. Itzhaki brings over 15 years of technology and leadership experience, having served in senior positions at global powerhouses including Check Point, Microsoft and Medallia. Levi has a rich background in executive technology leadership, extensive white hat hacking experience and well-honed expertise in cyber technologies and solution development.

“Tackling the surge of bot attacks takes a nuanced and complete understanding of both fraudster and consumer behavior. Forter’s identity graph of over one billion personas, combined with the depth and breadth of our attacker intelligence means we’ll be able to block even the most sophisticated bot attacks in real-time,” said Itzhaki. “We’re looking forward to bringing our powerful teams together to fight fraud and build trust.”

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