Le web scraping (or web data extraction) is the automated extraction of data from websites. While this technique can be used for legitimate purposes, it can also pose cybersecurity problems.
Web scraping is an automated technique used to collect structured data from websites. Using scripts bots or specialised tools, this method analyses the HTML/CSS or JavaScript code of a web page to extract targeted information (text, images, prices, links, etc.) and store it in a usable format (database, CSV, JSON, etc.).
๐ฏ Objective
Massive data collection for the purposes of analysis, monitoring, comparison or database input...
๐ Use case :
- Business Intelligence competitive analysis, price monitoring, etc.
- Search scientific or social data collection...
- Media reputation monitoring, content aggregation, etc.
- IA/Machine learning : creation of data sets to train models (e.g. text corpora)
๐ง Techniques and tools
- Free tools : Beautiful Soup (Python), Scrapy (Python framework), Selenium (browser automation)...
- No-code tools : Octoparse, ParseHub...
- Methods DOM (Document Object Model) analysis, HTTP requests (libraries such as requests), parsing of hidden JSON/API...
๐จ Cybersecurity problems linked to web scraping
- Data theft sensitive : Web scraping can be used to collect personal, financial or health information, which can then be resold (on the darkweb) or used for malicious purposes.
- Invasion of privacy : the massive collection of personal data can invade the privacy of individuals.
- Identity theft : the data collected may be used to impersonate individuals or companies.
- Phishing : the e-mail addresses collected may be used to send phishing messages, with the aim of stealing personal or financial information.
- Attacks by denial of service (DDoS) : Web scraping can be used to launch DDoS attacks, which consist of saturating a website with requests, making it inaccessible to legitimate users.
- Counterfeiting : the data collected may be used to counterfeit products or services.
- Unfair competition Price scraping allows competitors to price aggressively, disrupting fair market practices.
๐ How can I protect myself from web scraping?
For companies:
- Anti-scraping protection CAPTCHA, IP rotation, bot blocking
- Dynamic pages data generated by JavaScript (requiring headless browsers such as Puppeteer)
- Variable structure frequent changes to the site's source code
- Monitor site activity to detect web scraping attempts
- Compliance with conditions of use Prohibit scraping in terms and conditions of use
- Limit the frequency of requests so as not to overload the servers (respecting the robots.txt).
For individuals:
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- Be vigilant about the personal information you publish online
- Use different, complex passwords for each website
- Activation of thetwo-factor authentication where possible
- Do not click on links from unknown sources
- Use antivirus software and firewall
To find out more, read the article :
Web scraping: how to automatically retrieve data from the web
