Sydney Opera House seeks automated AI bot protection for website

The Sydney Opera House Trust (SOHT) is searching for an organisation to provide an automated website bot protection for its main website.

It wants a solution that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) or automation and does not require curation of manual rule sets to be effective.

Published in a request for tender, the SOH is looking to protect its main domain sydneyoperahouse.com and any sub domains from denial of service, account takeover, API abuse, system takeover, web content scraping and payment and credit card fraud.

The tenderer must be a qualified Advanced Registered Supplier on the NSW Government ICT Services Scheme.

SOH uses the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential 8 Maturity Model and expects any organisations to have a strong understanding of this model.

Features of the solution should include protection to the SOHT’s customer AWS Lambda middleware, control over the SOHT whitelist and options for both full website and dynamic website areas including transaction path, account areas and online forms.

The solution is also expected to minimise impact on load time for human users, minimise impact to website performance, distinguish between good and bad bots on report on bot activity, have predefined and configurable alerts alerting if any bad bot activity.

According to the SOH, its website gets about 60 million requests a year, so the solution must also be able to support sudden spikes in traffic.

The SOH also expects the selected tenderer to provide dedicated support for SOHT during deployment and implementation including configuration and optimisation of product.

The tenderer should also provide ongoing system maintenance, training for administrators, as well as a strong line of communication if any problems occur.

The solution should also work with various content delivery networks including AWS Cloudfront, and must function with SOH’s current website stack built on Drupal and hosted on Acquia in AWS.

The tender closes on July 21, and the selected contract will be awarded on August 30.

The contract is set to commence on October 1, 2023.