BENEFITS OF WEB CRAWLING AND SCRAPING

In Business
MONITORING THE NEWS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

What is being said about your organization in the media? Do you review industry forums? Are there
comments posted on external sites by your customers that you might not even be aware of to which
your team should be responding? A web crawler can monitor news sites, social media sites (Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), industry forums and others to get information on what is being said about you
and your competitors. This kind of information could be invaluable to your marketing team to keep a
pulse on your company image through sentiment analysis. This can help you know more about your
customers’ perceptions and how you are comparing against your competition.

COMPETITIVE INFORMATION

Are people on your sales, marketing or product management teams tasked with going online to find out
what new products or services are being provided by your competitors? Are you searching the
competition to review pricing to make sure you are priced competitively in your space? What about
comparing how your competitors are promoting their products to customers? A web crawler can be set
up to grab that information, and then it can be provided to you so you can concentrate on analyzing that
data rather than finding it. If you’re not currently monitoring your competition in this way, maybe you
should be.

LEAD GENERATION

Does your business rely on information from other websites to help you generate a portion of your
revenues? If you had better, faster access to that information, what additional revenues might that
influence? An example is companies that specialize in staffing and job placement. When they know
which companies are hiring, it provides them with an opportunity to reach out to those companies and
help them fill those positions. They may wish to crawl the websites of key or target accounts, public job
sites, job groups on LinkedIn and Facebook or forums on sites like Quora or Freelance to find all new job
postings or details about companies looking for help with various business requirements. Capturing all
those leads and returning them in a useable format can help generate more business.

TARGET LISTS

A crawler can be set up to do entity extraction from websites. Say, for example, an automobile
association needs to reach out to all car dealerships and manufacturers to promote services or industry
events. A crawler can be set up to crawl target websites that provide relevant company listings to pull
things like addresses, contact names and phone numbers (if available), and that content can be provided
in a single, usable repository.
POSTING ALERTS

Do you have partners whose websites you need to monitor for information in order to grow your
business? Think of the real estate or rental agent who is constantly scouring the MLS (Multiple Listing
Service) and other realtor listing sites to find that perfect home or commercial property for a client they
are serving. A web crawler can be set up to extract and send all new listings matching their
requirements from multiple sites directly to their inbox as soon as they are posted to give them a leg up
on their competition.

SUPPLIER PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

If you are purchasing product from various suppliers, you are likely going back and forth between their
sites to compare offerings, pricing and availability. Being able to compare this information without going
from website to website could save your business a lot of time and ensure you don’t miss out on the
best deals!

In Cybersecurity
1. Identifying The Target

The first phase of a web scraping attack involves identifying a business’ URL address and parameter
values.

The web scraper bot relies on the information it collects to attack the target website. It can be through
creating fake accounts on the website they’re after, using parody IP addresses, or even hiding the
identity of the scraper bot.

2. Scraping The Target

The web scraper bot then runs on the target app or website to achieve its objectives.

During scraping, the site’s resources tend to be overburdened, resulting in an extreme slowdown or
sometimes a total site breakdown.

3. Data Extraction

Guided by its objectives, the bot extracts content and/or data from the website and stores it in its
database. Worst of all, the bot might use the same data extracted from the website to perform more
malicious attacks.
Web Scraping Protection to Enhance Security of a Website

After understanding how web scraping attacks happen, readers can now establish how to protect their
websites against these malevolent operations. With substantial knowledge of web scraping, stopping
these attacks can be more manageable.

Some of the methods one can use to enhance cybersecurity against web scraping include:

1. Detect Any Bot Activities

Web scraping attacks are initiated and conducted by bots. But if businesses can detect their activities in
the early stages of the attack, it’s possible to prevent them.

People need to keep checking their traffic patterns and logs often. If they identify any activities alerting
them of a possible malicious attack, they can move with speed to limit the bot’s access or even block the
operation altogether.

Indicators of a web scraping attack include:

Attempts to get to hidden files

Repetitive actions coming from the same IP

2. Other Tips in Identifying Web Scraping Attacks

While the most common way people use to detect bot activities in their websites is IP-based, bots are
becoming more sophisticated. They can navigate between thousands or even millions of IP addresses.

Therefore, to be more effective, one needs to use other approaches to detect any indicators that their
website is under attack. Such indicators include the speed with which the fake user completes forms,
clicks, and mouse movement.

The methods to use to detect these indicators include:

Using JavaScript: With JavaScript, websites can gather so much information, including resolution/screen
size and installed fonts, among others. For example, getting many requests from different users with the
same screen sizes should raise red flags, especially if the user keeps clicking a button at regular intervals.
The chances are high that it’s a scraper.
Repetitive requests that are similar: Even if they come from different IP addresses, they may indicate a
web scraping attack.

Rate limiting: One can slow down web scrapers by only allowing a certain number of particular actions
at a time. For instance, website owners commonly approach this by limiting searches done per second
from any IP address or user.

Using CAPTCHAS: CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are
designed to allow legitimate users (humans) to access a website’s services while filtering out bots. The
only problem is while many CAPTCHAs will make a site more secure, they often result in a much less
pleasant user experience.