![]() ![]() The two most common use cases are price scraping and content theft. Web scraping is considered malicious when data is extracted without the permission of website owners. The combined power of the infected systems enables large scale scraping of many different websites by the perpetrator. Individual botnet computer owners are unaware of their participation. Resources needed to run web scraper bots are substantial-so much so that legitimate scraping bot operators heavily invest in servers to process the vast amount of data being extracted.Ī perpetrator, lacking such a budget, often resorts to using a botnet-geographically dispersed computers, infected with the same malware and controlled from a central location. Malicious scrapers, on the other hand, crawl the website regardless of what the site operator has allowed. Legitimate bots abide a site’s robot.txt file, which lists those pages a bot is permitted to access and those it cannot.Malicious bots, conversely, impersonate legitimate traffic by creating a false HTTP user agent. For example, Googlebot identifies itself in its HTTP header as belonging to Google. Legitimate bots are identified with the organization for which they scrape.That said, several key differences help distinguish between the two. Since all scraping bots have the same purpose-to access site data-it can be difficult to distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots. A variety of bot types are used, many being fully customizable to: Web scraping tools are software (i.e., bots) programmed to sift through databases and extract information. ![]() An online entity targeted by a scraper can suffer severe financial losses, especially if it’s a business strongly relying on competitive pricing models or deals in content distribution. Web scraping is also used for illegal purposes, including the undercutting of prices and the theft of copyrighted content. ![]()
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