Namogoo CEO Chemi Katz: Malware Can Ruin the Customer Journey

Chemi Katz is CEO of Namogoo.

In this exclusive interview, Katz discusses the threat of online customer journey hijacking and offers advice on how to combat it.

CRM Buyer: What is online journey hijacking, and why is it important to prevent it?

Chemi Katz: The customer journey is the path that e-commerce customers follow when they visit a site, and ideally, it culminates in a purchase.

Hijacking interferes with the customer’s journey. It could be a pop-up that the company didn’t intentionally place, or something that directs a customer off the website. It’s any interference that doesn’t originate from the e-commerce business itself, but from a third party that does it for malicious reasons and to generate revenue.

It’s essential to prevent it because it can cause e-commerce businesses to lose money. Every e-commerce company brings a customer in to enjoy the experience and eventually buy a product. Journey hijacking leads customers to a different product, ultimately resulting in the e-commerce company losing money. When you click on a product, you are eventually directed to a different website. It all comes down to money, and having a good experience and journey on an e-commerce website.

What are the best ways to prevent online journey hijacking?

Katz: Our installation involves adding one line of code to every page that you want to protect, and all of our clients put it on 100 percent of their pages.

Basically, the code is a living code on the client’s page and mobile device. Due to the nature of dynamic pages and the dynamic content of e-commerce, there is no single truth for every page. We utilize machine learning and algorithms to understand the page’s content in real-time.

For every client, we have a model for how we envision the pages should look. This code is updated multiple times a day because e-commerce businesses constantly change their content, and we must keep pace with these changes.

Why is machine learning an important part of preventing online journey hijacking? What makes for an effective machine-learning system?

Katz: Machine learning is 70 percent of the system, and I’ll explain why. We need to be very efficient about what we do. We don’t want to add anything to the page that hinders performance, and we want to remove anything that does that.

There’s a lot of malware hijacking going on, and one of the most important things is knowing how to learn about new attacks all the time. When it detects suspicious evidence on the page or within the code, it sends it back to our machine-learning servers, where they process the data. They decide if it’s legit or not.

Additionally, if we identify a malware element on one e-commerce site, we send it to others, as it’s part of an ongoing attack. The entire system is constantly refreshed, learning continuously, and referring from client to client and across different verticals.

How do you see client-side digital malware evolving? What’s in the future? What new threats will it pose?

Katz: In the last six months, we’ve seen a lot of this kind of malware coming from public WiFi networks at places like coffee shops and airports, and we see a lot of it even on clean devices, just from browsing.

It infects devices through Wi-Fi. When I’m at Starbucks and connected to the Starbucks Wi-Fi, I can, by mistake or unknowingly, download some kind of malware, and then I get it. We often see surveys that appear on a website, but they actually didn’t originate from that website itself.

Another thing we’re witnessing is when a plug-in is missing, and then, upon installation, you get nasty malware. It’s constantly shifting and changing. We need to remember that their primary goal is to make money.

Does ad-blocker software protect consumers from this kind of malware and journey hijacking?

Katz: Most of the people who have ad blockers will still see banner ads, because they are competing with ad blockers. They know how to bypass them. They know how to bypass most of the ad-blocking software.

In addition to affecting the bottom line, does online journey hijacking impact other aspects of the e-commerce experience, such as the brand’s experience and understanding?

Katz: Yes, it affects all kinds of things: how the website looks, the color, the pictures. Malware can change anything. We see malware that puts ads when there was nothing. They create white space. For example, they can push the homepage down and have advertising at the top.

Eventually, what the e-commerce business wanted on top of the fold can go below the fold. All the efforts that e-commerce sites are making to perfect the journey can be compromised by this type of hijacking.