Machine Learning Security for DC Comics

dccomics
log messages processed a day
suspicious requests identified

DC Entertainment is home to the iconic brands DC Comics, Vertigo, and MAD Magazine. Along with chronicling the adventures of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and many more, DC houses the creative division charged with strategically integrating its content across Warner Bros. Entertainment and Time Warner.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

DC Entertainment serves up to 2 million requests per day and during events like San Diego Comic Con that number can be up to 4x higher. This increased traffic can adversely affect site performance. To make it worse, DC Entertainment site is routinely crawled by third parties looking for security vulnerabilities or new leaks ahead of announcements. Sorting through this traffic to identify malicious traffic is a monumental task to accomplish at the best of times, and an impossible task in anything near real time.

SOLUTION

Metal Toad set up an AWS data pipeline using an SNS trigger to start a Lambda job when CloudFront logs were stored in S3. The Lambda parsed the logs, removing unnecessary columns. Data scientists identified SageMaker’s IPInsights as a suitable algorithm and parsed several days of logs into test and training data.

The first set was pretty obviously malicious based on just looking at the query parameters, and could probably have been handled by tuning the WAF on CloudFront better. 

The second find was better. The data scientist originally thought that these second groups may be a false positive. Deeper analysis of the IP addresses found a few gems, including a few WhiteHat scanning companies. 

With this new data, Metal Toad could block problem IP addresses and ensure that DC Entertainment could stay secure for another Comic Con.

 

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BUSINESS PROBLEM

The sales team at ABC was feeling a lot like substitute teachers, bogged down with cumbersome old tech and processes at crucial moments.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

A clear solution emerged: a single app that the sales team could use with any mobile device or computer

 
IMPACT

The new system revamped the entire sales process, making it faster, easier, and more efficient. 

 
BUSINESS PROBLEM

Whenever a big sweepstake was launched, avid fans would descend on the website and often overtax its servers. 

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

Moving the site’s servers to the cloud provided the elasticity Wheel of Fortune needed. 

 
IMPACT

When the team launches new sweepstakes, preventative scaling is used to double, triple, or even quadruple their capacity to match expected traffic.

 
BUSINESS PROBLEM

DC Entertainment site is routinely crawled by third parties looking for security vulnerabilities or new leaks ahead of announcements.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

ML Log evaluation. We started by setting up a data pipeline that replicated the manual process Metal Toad had been doing for years

 
IMPACT

Quickly identified new threats. The ML Log Monitoring solution quickly found two groups of IPs for evaluation. 

 
BUSINESS PROBLEM

Fox needed a transformation to streamline operations, maximize efficiency, and optimize coordination. 

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION

The new platform will replace legacy systems with a solution that unifies viewer experience and aligns operations across the enterprise. 

 
IMPACT

Fox now has in hand the detailed plan they need to make Fox Mississippi a reality.

 
BUSINESS PROBLEM

When approaching Metal Toad for a potential partnership, they made it clear that their current website was falling short.

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Metal Toad improved usability, access to interactive modules, and site-wide responsiveness while optimizing Orchestra content for online search.
 
 
IMPACT
Visitor experience enjoyed vastly improved overall site usability, including ordering tickets, access to events calendar, quick-and-easy donations, and social sharing.
 
 
BUSINESS PROBLEM

Search results were stale, poorly ranked, and simply not delivering the content that users demanded. 

 
TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Metal Toad proposed a custom search solution that was scalable, reliable, and free from licensing costs or vendor lock-in.
 
 
IMPACT
A 40% increase in relevant hit rates, drastically reduced search page load times, and overall improved visitor satisfaction were reported within the first week of launch.
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