Web scraping refers to the use of tools like crawlers and scraping robots to extract valuable data and content from web pages, read parameter values and perform reverse engineering. It also helps to assess navigable paths and evaluate navigational paths. Web scraping caused a drop in global e-commerce revenues to a total of 70 billion dollars. This is why it is essential to know how to protect your websites against crawler and scraper bots.
In this article, we will cover the following topics:
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping, also known as Web data extraction, refers to the automated collection of structured web data. Web scraping is used for price monitoring, market research, news monitoring, price intelligence, and lead generation.
People and businesses can use web data extraction to make better decisions.
You’ve probably copied and pasted information from websites. This is the same as any web scraper. But it’s on a smaller, manual scale. Web scraping is a more efficient and less tedious way to extract data from the web’s seemingly infinite frontier.
It should not surprise you that web scraping offers something truly valuable since you can get structured web data from any public website.
Data web scraping is more than just a convenient tool. It has the potential to power some of the most innovative business applications in the world. Companies can use web scraped data to improve their operations and provide information that will help them make better decisions about customer service.
The basics of Web Scraping
Web Scraping is made up of two components: a web crawler and a scraper.
The Crawler
Web crawlers, also known as “spiders,” are artificial intelligence programs that search the web to index and find content. They first crawl the internet or one website to find URLs. These URLs are then passed on to the scraper.
The Scraper
A web scraper is a tool that extracts data quickly and accurately from web pages, is a specialized tool. Depending on the project, web scrapers can be complex or simple in design. Data locators (or selectors), which are used to locate the data you wish to extract from an HTML file, are an important part of any scraper. Usually, XPath or CSS selectors, regex, or a combination thereof are used.
What is Web Scraping used for?
1) Price intelligence
Price intelligence is perhaps the most important use case for web-scraping. Modern e-commerce businesses can extract product and pricing information from other websites and turn it into intelligence. This is a crucial part of making better pricing and marketing decisions and can help companies with revenue optimization, competitor monitoring, or monitoring product trends.
2) Market research
Market research is crucial for companies to stay competitive and should be based on the best information. Market analysis and business intelligence are fuelled by high-quality, high-volume, highly informative web scraped data in every size and shape. Market trend analysis based on web scraped information can help corporations with market pricing, optimized point of entires, R&D, and competitor monitoring.
3) Finance
Web data specifically designed for investors can help you uncover alpha and create radical value. The world’s top firms are increasingly using web scraped data due to the tremendous strategic value that can be gained by extracting information from SEC filings, public sentiment analysis, and monitoring news events.
4) Real estate
Agents and brokerages can incorporate web-scrapped product data into their everyday business to make informed market decisions about appraised property values, vacancy rates, rental yields, market direction, etc.
5) News & content monitoring
Web scraping news data can be a great way to monitor, aggregate, and analyze the most important stories in your industry, such as public sentiment analysis, competitor monitoring, etc.
6) Lead generation
Web data extraction can be used to access structured lead lists via the internet.
Why is Web Scraping protection important?
1) Price intelligence
Price intelligence is perhaps the most important use case for web-scraping. Modern e-commerce businesses can extract product and pricing information from other websites and turn it into intelligence. This is a crucial part of making better pricing and marketing decisions and can help companies with revenue optimization, competitor monitoring, or monitoring product trends.
2) Market research
Market research is crucial for companies to stay competitive and should be based on the best information. Market analysis and business intelligence are fuelled by high-quality, high-volume, highly informative web scraped data in every size and shape. Market trend analysis based on web scraped information can help corporations with market pricing, optimized point of entires, R&D, and competitor monitoring.
3) Finance
Web data specifically designed for investors can help you uncover alpha and create radical value. The world’s top firms are increasingly using web scraped data due to the tremendous strategic value that can be gained by extracting information from SEC filings, public sentiment analysis, and monitoring news events.
4) Real estate
Agents and brokerages can incorporate web-scrapped product data into their everyday business to make informed market decisions about appraised property values, vacancy rates, rental yields, market direction, etc.
5) News & content monitoring
Web scraping news data can be a great way to monitor, aggregate, and analyze the most important stories in your industry, such as public sentiment analysis, competitor monitoring, etc.
6) Lead generation
Web data extraction can be used to access structured lead lists via the internet.
Why is Web Scraping protection important?
Web scraping has been around for years for price comparisons, market research, and content analysis by search engines.
The problem is that Web crawling and scraping can also be used for illegal purposes, such as content theft, SEO attacks, and wagering price wars. You want to make sure your website is adequately protected against Web Scraping with malicious intent.
How to protect your website from Scraping?
Web scraping bots are becoming more sophisticated and can mimic human users. Traditional web security methods no longer work against them. You can put up many obstacles and challenges to stop malicious bot operators from performing their tasks. To reduce web scraping and scraping attacks, you can use the following web scraping protection tips.
1) Advanced Traffic Analysis
You can monitor and analyze incoming web traffic to make sure you get only legitimate human visitors. This will prevent malicious crawlers and scraping bots from accessing your site. Traffic analysis is not possible with traditional firewalls or IP blocking. Advanced traffic analysis and bot detection should include:
- Analyzing Behavioral and Data pattern: It is important to look out for unusual patterns in the way users interact with the website. Strangembrowsing patterns, excessive requests at high rates, repeated password requests, suspicious session histories, large volumes of product views, and other such issues are red flags. Combining global threat intelligence with past attacks history, user behavior, and patterns can be used to distinguish between a bot and human traffic.
- IP Reputation: You must monitor requests for IP reputation. This is possible with the support of global intelligence and security solutions. You must closely monitor IP addresses that have a history of being used in malicious activities or attacks. These requests should be carefully examined.
- Fingerprinting HTML: You can filter out malicious bot traffic by analyzing HTML headers carefully and comparing them against an updated header signature database.
- False-positive management: Blocking legitimate users from accessing the site in the scraping protection process is counterproductive. Your traffic analysis should be able to manage false positives and minimize them efficiently.
2) Rate Limiting Requests
While human users cannot browse 1000 or 100 web pages per second, scraper bots are able to and will. You can restrict the number of requests that an IP address can make in a time frame and limit the content that can be scraped. This will protect your website against malicious requests.
3) Take advantage of CAPTCHA.
Bots cannot answer CAPTCHA questions. These challenges can be thrown intelligently to slow down web scraping robots. Constant CAPTCHA challenges are not recommended, as it negatively impacts the user experience. These challenges should only be used when absolutely necessary, when you receive a large volume of requests in a matter of seconds, for example.
4) Modify HTML Markup Regularly
Web scraping bots rely on patterns in HTML Markup to efficiently navigate the site, find useful data, and save it. You must ensure that the HTML Markup is updated regularly to prevent web scraping bots. The website doesn’t need to be completely redesigned. To complicate scraping, you could simply modify the class and id of your HTML.
Conclusion.
The fight between web admins and scrapers is never-ending. Each must be vigilant to ensure they stay one step ahead of their counterparts.
Anyone with the right resources and tenacity can bypass all of these solutions. However, it is a good idea not to lose sight of traffic and to ensure that your services are being used as you intended.
Hope you liked this article on Protecting your Website Against Crawler and Scraper Bots
Are you interested in kickstarting your career in Cybersecurity no matter your educational background or experience? Click Here to find out how.
