Introduction: Threat of Scraping and why it has become more prominent these days
In today's digital economy, data is often hailed as the new gold. Businesses and Organizations hold a treasure trove of data which include product catalogs, pricing models, customer reviews, and dynamic content—that differentiate them from competitors. As data is the biggest differentiator, this data is always under siege by attacks driven by automated bots mostly sponsored/undertaken at the behest of the competitors who want to limit the competitive advantage of their adversaries. The main challenge for organizations in this digital-first economy is to ensure that their proprietary data is safeguarded from scraping attacks. These attacks fall under the broad category of Scraping (OAT-015) under the OWASP Automated Threats to Web Applications list. Scraping can be of different types but can be mainly classified into Price Scraping and Content Scraping.
The idea behind this blog is to talk about how scraping attacks erode business value, compromise user trust, and destabilize digital operations and why a dedicated bot management solution like Radware Bot Manager is essential to safeguard the organization’s digital asset.
What is Scraping?
Scraping is the automated extraction of data from websites or applications, typically executed by bots (software scripts) that mimic human behavior to bypass security measures. These bots crawl through web pages, APIs, or mobile apps, harvesting information at scale—often without the target’s consent.
The two main types of scraping include
- Price Scraping: Competitors try to scrape the product prices to gain competitive pricing advantage
- Content Scraping: Content in the form of Articles, catalog, images, or videos are scraped
Why should Scraping matter to Businesses?
Beyond the primary issue of losing your own data, there are other secondary issues that businesses need to be aware of:
- Losing competitive advantage: If competitors can scrape the pricing data, an e-Commerce firm can lose the competitive advantage in terms of pricing and that could impact the business immensely
- Revenue Loss: Scraping can also enable other fraudulent activities like scalping where bots can first hoard the inventory and later have them sold at a higher price later
- Impact on Website performance: If bots deployed by competitors are continuously deployed and are working at scale to scrape content and price information, that could in turn lead to poor website performance during peak usage times thus degrading the company’s reputation
- Compliance and Regulatory Risks: With Data Privacy laws like GDPR in place, the cost of a data breach in whatever form could potentially have significant negative ramifications for businesses and thus it is in the best interest of companies to protect their data from being scraped
Why Traditional Security Measures against scraping attacks fall short?
Conventional security measures, such as rate limiting, IP blocking, etc. fall short when it comes to stopping modern scraping attacks. Attackers leverage vast networks of residential proxies, headless browsers, etc. to bypass basic defences. So the following methodologies don’t work effectively:
- IP-Based Blocking: Attackers now have access to resources that can help rotate across a multitude of IPs, hence IP-based blocking will be ineffective.
- User-Agent and Header-Based Filtering: Advanced scrapers can dynamically adjust their headers and User Agents to appear as legitimate browsers, avoiding signature-based detection
- Rate Limiting : Advanced Bots can mimic natural browsing patterns, distributing requests across multiple sessions and devices, making rate-limiting ineffective.
As scraping techniques evolve, businesses need more advanced, behavioral-based bot detection strategies that go beyond traditional defences to effectively mitigate these threats.
How does Radware Bot Manager solution look at solving the scraping challenge?
In our experience of working with multiple customers who have had the issue of scraping attacks, a traditional cookie-cutter approach towards prevention and mitigation of scraping attacks doesn’t work. Scraping attacks are typically attacks carried out at scale by automated bots and to be able to automatically identify the behavioral anomaly and be able to mitigate the attack in real-time becomes extremely critical.
Radware Bot Manager solution takes a holistic approach towards behavioural anomaly detection. Advanced ML-based Behavioural modules help identify the anomalies in real-time. We use a combination of techniques which at a high level do the following:
- Using Behavioral features-based anomaly detection module to detect these types of attacks: By using a combination of multiple behavioral features and feeding that feature vector into an Anomaly Detection algorithm, we can isolate the sources with bad scores and flag them as anomalous. These behavioral features are specifically selected in such a way that an anomaly in these very strongly indicates a scraping attack. For example, if bots are involved in scraping attacks, they typically attack the catalog/product listing URL and access multiple different URLs within a short period of time.
- Typical Scraping bots tend to keep changing the path or query parameter in the URL, the reason being the bots want to try and access as many different product listing/catalog URLs as they can within a short period of time. By learning the behavior genuine users on a typical URL (having path or query parameters or both), Radware Bot Manager can baseline the normal behaviour and then be able to flag anything outside of it as anomalous and be able to block the attack
The above two are just two examples of how Radware Bot Manager looks at understanding how a scraping attack can unfold and be able to target at the root of the problem rather than having static cookie-cutter solutions that can’t typically be effective in the majority of the new-age advanced scraping attacks.
Recent Customer Succes Story
A recent noteworthy customer example to talk about specifically in the scraping attack context is a leading online marketplace and classifieds platform in Israel where users can buy and sell a wide range of goods and services, including real estate, vehicles, second-hand items and more.
One of the main problems that the organization was facing was the advertisements placed on their website were being scraped and the opinion was that one of their main competitors was triggering that automated bot attack. Since this was clearly a competitive disadvantage for them and they were seeing it as a business impact, they reached out to Radware to protect against such Scraping attacks. Radware Bot Manager with its multi-layered approach to Bot Detection combined with its strong emphasis on ML-based Anomaly Detection modules was able to significantly reduce the incidence of scraping seen in the customer application thus leading to a significant positive business impact and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Imperative to Protect your business now more than ever….
The financial and reputational risks associated with scraping attacks are not to be ignored by any organization. With the rapid advancement of AI, the attackers now have a lot of easy ammunition available at their disposal to carry out large-scale scraping attacks. If Businesses ignore this rapidly increasing threat, then the potential of significant ramifications is very high.
Thus the need to secure your application with a dedicated Bot Management solution. Radware Bot Manager Solution provides a multi-layered approach to Bot Detection and mitigation combining AI-driven detection, behavioral analysis, and proactive mitigation to keep your data secure.
It’s the time to Fortify your Defenses
Explore our Free Assessment tools to assess the risk your application is at. If you are Under Attack, do reach out to us from here. If you are interested in exploring the Radware Solution, please do contact our team here to learn how we can tailor our solution to your needs.