How to implement web scraping protection to secure your website? Here are some best ways to protect your site from web scraping.
Web scraping, also known as screen scraping, web harvesting, and website data extraction – is the act of extracting content or data from a website. One example of a simple form of web scraping is when you right-click an image on a site to save it or copy its address. Technically, at that time, you are engaging in web scraping. But, that’s a harmless kind of scraping. It’s totally legal.
However, some forms of it can be used for malicious activities. It can burden a site’s server. At times, it can even lead to cyber/criminal attacks. For that, the attacker would use certain kinds of bots and programs. These bots are capable of extracting data automatically at a super-fast rate thus burdening the server.
The scraper program used for this purpose is capable of generating multiple requests at a fast rate. The perpetrators use this technicality to perform a DDoS attack. Please note that for the data available in the public domain, this is completely fine.
However, some programs are more sophisticated which are capable of bypassing the security system of a website. They can, therefore, steal more sensitive data such as the financial information of a website.
For many sites, web scraping can be a huge issue. Therefore, it’s paramount to understand it so that you can avoid unscrupulous activities and safeguard your data/content.
How to Protect Your Site from Web Scraping
Securing Your Website
To make sure that your site remains protected against scraping activities, you can take the following measures:
1. Dictate it in the Terms of Usage
This might sound like a basic method, but it’s both a simple and effective way to protect your site from web scraping. Basically, you can give an explicit warning declaring that you are against scraping web content as per your terms of usage. For instance, you could try saying something like
“The content on this site is allowed for reproduction only for non-commercial and personal usage”.
Although this method may not necessarily stop the hackers from attacking your site, it WILL stop those with honest intentions. It also carries many legal advantages.
See also– Best Guide to Start a Blog for Beginners in 2021
2. Prevent Hotlinking
Hotlinking is using one site’s resources such as files, videos, and images and using it on other websites via the original site’s resources. Web scraping puts a lot of load on the original site and increases its bandwidth and server cost.
Therefore, it’s good to prevent hotlinking of your images so that when displaying your images on other sites, your resources remain safe. Although this is, in no way, a method of avoiding your data from theft, you will still be able to mitigate the damage.
3. Use CSRF tokens
You can think of CSRF tokens as a secret/unique number that the web server generates and transmits to the client every time there is an HTTP request from the client’s side. Next time there’s another request, the server will check for whether or not the request carries this token and will accordingly reject it upon sensing the missing link.
Only a highly sophisticated scraper bot can get around this token. They do it by picking the right token and bundling it with each request. But, only highly advanced bots can do that so it means you’re still safeguarded.
Check your Traffic Regularly To Limit Unusual Activities
One of the best ways to avoid web scrapers from infiltrating your content/data is to deploy a monitoring system. The idea is to detect the presence of unusual activities that might hint towards the presence of a web scraping bot. It can then block and/or limit the activities of that bot. Here are some ways you can do that –
4. Rate limiting
Under this method, you limit the activities that can happen within a small time frame to a limited number. This applies to both scrapers as well as legit users. For example, you could limit the number of searches from a particular IP address to a certain number for every minute or second. This is a classic way to deter scraper bot activities and protect your site from web scraping.
While you’re blocking and rate-limiting the traffic, you can also deploy some tactics that go beyond detecting IP addresses. Below are some ways in which you can identify the activities of scraper bots –
- Quick form submissions
- Linear clicks and mouse movements
- Checking timezone, screen resolutions, browser types, etc. to recognize the presence of bots.
5. Require account creation
Asking your users to register first and then log in using the access details is a good way to avoid web scrapers. However, you should remember that this practice may also affect the user experience greatly. It could even discourage legitimate users. Therefore, use this option wisely.
What’s more, many sophisticated bots will create multiple accounts using the registration process. Therefore, it’s better to use an email address for verification and registration purposes.
6. Using CAPTCHAS
The idea behind using CAPTCHA is to differentiate between humans and computers. For this technique to be effective, you need to keep the test easy enough that humans can solve it but also difficult enough for bots.
This method is good for sensitive pages as well as every time the system detects scraper activities and wants to bring it to a halt. It helps you to protect your site from web scraping.
7. Avoid exposing your API endpoints and the entire content
Avoid placing all of your blogs in one directory otherwise, they can become easily accessible with a quick search. Try to make them accessible only through on-site search.
In this way, the bot will have to manually look for all phrases to find all the blogs which will be a difficult process even for the most complex scrapers.
Also, avoid exposing your API end-points because they can be reverse-engineered.
Secure Your Pages
Earlier in the post, we talked about how asking users to create an account and log in using the credentials is one way to avoid the scraping of content. This is a good practice because it can block the automated bots upon detecting unscrupulous activities. Scrapped content can create a duplicate content issue with Google algorithms and can impact your SEO strategy.
It can even ban the account upon detecting possible scraping activities. Although securing your pages is not a surefire way of completely stopping the scraping of content, it will surely give you great insight and control.
So, here’s more on how you can proceed cautiously in that direction.
8. Regularly change the HTML Markup of your Site
One way in which web scrapers work is by recognizing certain patterns and using that to exploit the site’s HTML markup. Recognizing the pattern is the quickest way to attack a site’s HTML and exploit many of its possible vulnerabilities.
Therefore, you should regularly keep on changing the HTML markup as frequently as possible. This will make sure that your markup is inconsistent and non-uniformed. This will deter bots and attackers from effectively finding any noticeable patterns.
9. Create honeypot/trap pages
Trap pages or honey pot pages or hidden pages are that no average human visitor would click. They will mostly blend in with the color of the background so they don’t look apparent.
But, since a bot is designed to click any and every link on a site, you can recognize their presence when there are clicks on a trap link. You can, almost always, be sure that the clicks from honeypot pages are coming from an attack. So, as a measure, you can block requests from that particular source.
Bottom Line
When it comes to protecting your site from web scraping, precaution is always better than cure. Surely, by implementing these practices, you can ensure that the content on your site will remain safe and intact from unscrupulous activities.