King is a social games company that was founded in 2003. So far they’ve developed games for web, mobile and Facebook. One of their best-sellers, which you’ve probably heard of, is Candy Crush Saga. The game was downloaded over 10 million times in its first month. It quickly became the number one most-played game on Facebook and by January 2014, it had over 150 million monthly users. At the beginning of 2016, King was acquired by Activision Blizzard for a staggering $5.9 billion.
So far, King has developed 200 fun titles, and offers games that are enjoyed all around the world. Their franchises beside Candy Crush include Farm Heroes, Pet Rescue and Bubble Witch. They have 409 million monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2016 across web, social and mobile platforms.
Jacque Erasmus is their CIO; he’s been with King for over five years. Today he was happy to explain how they use WhoAPI.
“We are essentially tapping our egress traffic out of our offices and feeding it into an automated system we have built. One of the components where we pass the raw traffic to is the WhoAPI module in our framework. We look at the domain of a specific stream and match that against our list of already interrogated domains. If it’s not there, we query WhoAPI, where we then take various information on that particular domain and save it into our database,” he says.
Because of the nature of the problem, such as malware, we can’t go deeper into the details regarding which information they look for, but Jacque sums it up nicely.
“Basically, WhoAPI is used to identify and generate indicators of compromise for further investigation and is an essential datapoint,” he explains.
If you are a developer, designer, or a data scientist, King is hiring for all positions and, as they put it, even for those that don’t start with the letter D. So jump over to their jobs page, and see if there’s a vacant position. On the other hand, if you are tired of reading and working, why not return to your Candy Crush Saga game?
