Published June 11
For most of the internet’s history, the playbook was simple: bots bad, humans good. Block the bots, protect the revenue. Human thinks that playbook is obsolete.
As AI agents become a mainstream part of how consumers search, shop and transact, a new line has emerged between threat and opportunity.
The company’s senior vice president and global head of marketing, Sarah Acker, laid out why the agentic era is forcing a fundamental rethink of cybersecurity strategy. The challenge is no longer just stopping malicious traffic. It’s understanding intent at scale.
What transformation is Human going through as a company?
The interesting thing as we move into this agentic era is that agents are bots. Over the course of the history of the company, 14 years, we’ve been building a credible detection engine to understand synthetic traffic at scale.
We see more than 20 trillion bot-or-not decisions in a week. Bots are not all bad. Humans are not all good. You need to know what is coming to your site, what they’re trying to do, and [then ask]: Do you want to let them do that?
Let the good in. Because once upon a time, bots should not be shopping. And now agents acting on behalf of real humans — spending real dollars — you want to let them shop.
A recent Human report found only a half-percent difference between a malicious bot and a benign bot. Why is the gap so small, and how do you tell them apart?
The one thing that’s interesting is the bad actors have AI too. They just don’t have the laws and the restrictions that put parameters on their use of it.
We’ve always been the experts at detecting sophisticated bots at scale. The ease at which somebody might be able to become sophisticated is changing.
How has AI changed the paradigm in terms of making it easier to detect fraud or harder?
We’ve been using machine learning before people were talking about AI. That’s really what the core of our detection engine was built on.
Our machine-learning algorithms are getting smarter, so we are able to keep up because of the nature of our business, our clients and the inputs we see. One thing that really sets us apart is we have both the engine — the actual tech — and we also have a Satori threat intelligence team.
It’s kind of the art and the science. We have a team of really intelligent, incredible humans who are going out into the dark web to look for threats. Sometimes they go back and forth with our detection teams.
Here’s what we’re seeing in our data — how can we pair that with what we’re seeing out in the open internet to make our defenses stronger? [We’re] listening to what the bad actors are saying and doing in those spaces where we may not see it, but how can we make sure that’s fused back into our detection to make it that much stronger.
Why is trust and accountability such a core mission for Human right now?
Being able to differentiate between what is a malicious bot presenting a threat versus an agent representing a revenue opportunity.
You actually understand: What is bot, what is agent, what is human. You can make decisions that mitigate risk but also help bring more dollars into your organization. Because you understand exactly what is happening on your site and how to optimize for that.
What’s a real-world example of Human’s work with real-life consequences?
We talk a lot about the economics of cybercrime. Making it both less profitable and more risky for cybercriminals to do this type of activity. Until our 3ve method investigation a number of years ago, no one had ever gone to jail for ad fraud. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry.
We partnered with the FBI and a number of industry partners, including The Trade Desk, to mitigate that threat. It had real-world consequences. There are people that went to jail as a result of that. And that was the first time in history.
The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk Inc.
