How Do You Protect Against Web Scraping?

Web scraping is a method of data collection from any URLs or websites for different purposes, such as pricing analysis, competitor analysis, content reselling and a lot more.

Some people consider it as an automated bot threat, which cybercriminals use for punishable practices like extortion.

So! The biggest threat is the automated bot, which illegally scrape private and sensitive data. 

What is an Automated Bot?

An automated bot is a web scraping tool that crawls inside of the websites to extract data from web application. Besides this, it is able to assess navigation, parameter values and then, reverse the web engineering to learn about application workflow and a lot more things.

The scammers use it to copy a website, including its HTML code, database storage and even, save it to local disk. From there, it can be accessed for an in-depth analysis and draw valuable insights to fulfil their purpose.

What can web scraping bot be used for?

As the content is the real gold, many big firms, researchers and analysts want to access it. With this gold, they become richer of knowledge, which proves a breakthrough. Every business owner wants to have a valuable knowledge on customers, USPs, their engagement strategies, pricing and a lot more details. Manually, it may take months to collect useful niche-based information.

On the flip side, this bot does it in no time. Even, the copied content is automatically republished without spending any dollars.

This practice brings some extraordinary benefits for eCommerce merchant or online retailers. They hire professional and certified web scrapers to catch up with the real-time and accurate knowledge on customers, competitors and their behavior. These all details help them to create such competitive pricing that can attract more customers than that of competitors. Product catalogs, pricing details and competitor strategies are a few most meaningful information that bots steal away.

The scrapers hide their bad intentions and show only the brighter side of it. For example, hiQ Labs extracted LinkedIn data, where public data are shared openly. LinkedIn objected on the misuse of its data by the company. Being “public data”, this platform of professionals has nothing to protect against the GDPR breaching.

Many of you ask-is web data scraping legal?

To a certain extent, it is legal, except for the regulations of GDPR or the privacy policy. The legal battle between LinkedIn and hiQ Labs clearly states that public data is meant for public interest. But, the misuse of data scraping services is a threat, which is illegal. If it goes beyond that level and violates the privacy of any individual, the same web scraping becomes illegal. The extracting company may have to pay off thousands to millions of dollars as the compensation to data subjects (the owner of data).  

 How to identify a scraping attack?

It’s very easy. Following these three steps can help you to determine such attempts:

·        Check URL address and parameter values

If you see any scraping request coming from fake user accounts or unclear IP addresses, you should understand that the sender is marking malicious bots as good ones.

·        Slow website

There are a number of bots that are programmed to target a particular website, mobile application or API. If the targeting becomes overwhelming, the bot traffic overloads servers. As a result, the website slows down or faces downtime.

·        Request for web data extraction

These extracting bots attack to get proprietary content and databases from the target. Then, the content is stored in their own database for analysis or abusing web owners. 

Factors to verify before allowing data extraction

The verification of these factors is compulsory before extracting any data.

·        HTML fingerprint

It starts with the examination of HTML headers. This checking ensures if the requested party is a human or a bot. The frequent requests create patterns, which are compared against the constantly updated data from different known variants.

·        IP reputation

The IP identification saves your website from all cyber attacks. The expert analysts analyse the list of all visits from IP addresses. If any of them is found out with the history of any cyber assault, they are rigorously checked over and over.

·        Behavior analysis

As its name suggests, the experts monitor how visitors interact with the website. If it seems an abnormal way, such as sending requests aggressively and illogically, it would be considered as a distrustful browsing pattern. Most probably, it’s the bot that floods the website unnaturally with thousands of requests for extraction. People do it purposely for exhausting the bandwidth. 

·        Progressive Difficulties

These are the challenges that bots frequently create in different forms. Thankfully, there are cookie support, JavaScript execution and captcha to stop bots from making false attempts of scraping websites. 

Protection strategies against web extraction

For avoiding scraping threats, you should protect crawling. Here is how you can do it:

·        Track all user accounts that are frequently active to raise multiple requests for extraction, but make no purchases.

·        Monitor if or not the web page views are abnormally high. If yes, it’s a high time to stay alert from the bot attack.

·        Regularly monitor the requests if or not they come from competitors. If yes, block them using Honeypot trap or captcha.

·        Make the terms and conditions against the malicious use of web scraping live.

·        Use preventive measures as “robots.txt” files to know about the intentions of whoever visits the website. These files push bots to pass across the specific pages, which are meant for testing if it’s a human or a bot. The bot does not bother and pass out.