Preventing Content Scraping

Content/web scraping, harvesting or data extraction is the collection of data or content from public-facing applications. When scraping happens maliciously it is critical to ensure that infrastructure and customer experience is not negatively impacted. Attacks commonly hit retail, financial services, travel, hospitality and social media, and can result in stolen intellectual property, sales decline and brand degradation.

Content Scraping: Legitimate or Malicious?

Organizations often experience a combination of malicious scraping and search engine abuse that exhibit the following characteristics:

  • Multiple masking or evasive techniques disguise the activity including browser spoofing, forgery and sophisticated user agent rotation.
  • The search queries target every single web application URI across multiple locations and the patterns appear too perfect and too fast to be human.
  • The queries are distributed across a wide range of locations that don’t match the locations of the search queries themselves.
  • Many of the targeted URIs and inventory items queried do not exist, placing significant strain on their infrastructure.

Taken collectively, the findings provide strong evidence that the intent of the scraping and search activity is malicious.

Content Scraping: Legitimate or Malicious?

Bot Defense Content Scraping Prevention Differentiators

Agentless approach provides full spectrum analysis of HTTP traffic for both API and web-based applications.

Analyzes Both POST & GET Calls for Improved Detection

Uncover patterns indicative of content scraping by analyzing both HTTP POST and GET calls. Alternate JavaScript and SDK-based solutions rely heavily on HTTP POST, which limits their efficacy to detect and mitigate scraping activity.

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Customizable Detection and Response

Using over 150 customizable automation indicators, CQAI determines the malicious or benign intent of each content request transaction. Customizable mitigation policies provide multiple response options (block, rate limit, geo fence, deception), and findings can be sent to external systems for analysis/response.

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Automatically Protect New Content Without Delays or Overhead

Scraping attacks are highly automated, making newly published content highly vulnerable if not protected. When new web, mobile or API-based content is deployed, Bot Defense automatically discovers and protects it from content scraping activity.

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Consistent Protection for APIs and Web Applications

Bot Defense protects all of your public-facing applications from automated attacks including content or web scraping. A single consistent security policy protects all of your applications, allowing you to consolidate app security functions into a single platform.

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Protect Your Content and IP from Web Scraping with Bot Defense

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Detect Content Scraping Activity Faster

Deep behavioral analysis of the user intent means fraudulent activity is detected more quickly than competitive offerings. Quicker discovery, in turn, means more rapid incident response time.

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Enhance Security Effectiveness

Customizable automation indicators and responses enable you to fine tune and maximize attack prevention policies to eliminate fraud associated with content scraping.

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Flexible Deployment Options

With a container-based architecture, Bot Defense can be deployed in your data center, in the cloud or as a SaaS offering.

Our Customers

Every day, Cequence Security analyzes and protects billions of application transactions for customers in the financial services, retail, and social media industries.

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Customer Case Studies

Resources

Browse our library of datasheets, research reports, blogs, and archived webinars to learn more about our Application Security Platform

Research Reports
Bulletproof Proxies: The Evolving Cybercriminal Infrastructure

This report maps attack patterns observed within the Cequence Security customer base to one of the leading Bulletproof Proxy providers.

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Webinars
Preventing Fraud Caused by Account Takeovers

Organizations are plagued by automated attacks such as account takeovers and fake account creation. Learn how these attacks work, how the attackers hide in plain sight, and innovative strategies for catching malicious bots.

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Case Studies
Zoosk: Preventing ATOs and Romance Fraud

Discover how Zoosk eliminated romance fraud by preventing ATOs targeting the mobile APIs.

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Browse All Resources

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