SITUATION
The client used internally-developed software to collect data from competitor applications regarding activity in specific geographic regions. They were being investigated by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for anticompetitive monitoring of competitors and retained FTI Cybersecurity to help answer DOJ questions about data collection programs.
OUR ROLE
FTI Cybersecurity analyzed 3.5M lines of Java, Python, JavaScript, and Bash source code to understand the mechanics of programmatic access and collection. We assessed competitors’ application programming interfaces (APIs) to identify oversights in their data governance and anti-scrapping policies and determined what data was publicly accessible and how the client was able to collect it. We also developed an understanding of the client’s strategies to obtain competitor information over a geographic region.
OUR IMPACT
Our experts provided step-by-step examples to counsel demonstrating the client’s competitors did not enact policies to prevent public access of data via their APIs; that anyone could engage in activities similar to those of the client; and that competitors regularly engaged in similar activities to collect data from client’s application.