What is scrape? Hack that cost Meta 265 million euros in fine

The internet world is vast and you won’t always find the best situations wherever you go. Hackers are constantly lurking, especially on sites that are very popular due to the number of people using it. This becomes data criminals try to get it, and one of the techniques they use is the so-called scraping.

What is scraping and what does it consist of?

There are many techniques that hackers use to obtain data on the Internet. Some are very complex and can break even the most consistent computer security measures if they have the right tools. Of course, Many, like those using the scraping technique, are committed to creating software that facilitates and automates this procedure.

For those who don’t know, there may be quite a few in the room, Scraping is a technique known as ‘web scraping’ and is used to extract content from a website as well as a database.. It is used through software that creates a copy of a site’s content and also has two security aspects.

And we say this because many companies use these robots to legally obtain and even classify data. For example, If you used a price comparator this Black Friday, you used this software. And these pages are responsible for acquiring the data classified by price of websites in order to then present you the cheapest place to buy a product.

In what situations is scraping bad?

As we told you, there are two ways to engrave. We’ve told you about ‘good’ before, but it’s also defined because Robots that extract HTML code from a page are defined by the company that launched them. and also rThey uncovered the robot.txt file found on every web. limiting the use of these programs to certain pages of the site.

The plight that caused the Meta to be named Fine for leaking data from 533 accountsIt has to do with other apps. so heA company’s security is compromised when the scraping robots or users are not properly identified.also the expiration of the received data on an unauthorized server.

In fact, there are hackers who infect other computers to distribute the obtained data in more places, making them harder to find.

Can scraping be prevented?

As we said yesterday, Meta was fined for not taking the necessary measures to prevent these issues, as well as for large amounts of leaked data. Therefore, the answer is that scraping on the Internet can be avoided. Of course, as you can see, it is not enough to develop your site’s robot.txt file, however, it may be an improvement of the firewalls of the servers it is hosted on.

You can also use celebrities. blacklists to block specific IPs requesting access to scrape and limiting their number. You can also change the code of your page to make it more inaccessible to this type of software, but the most noticeable is the use of so-called honeypots or ‘honey jars’ in Spanish. These redirect these programs to a website with no data, slowing their work and helping you avoid these problems.