The New York Times vs. OpenAI: A Turning Point for Web Scraping?

In a recent blog, we covered the blurry lines of legality surrounding web scraping and how the advent of artificial intelligence AI and large language models LLMs further complicates the matter. Shortly after publishing the blog, a significant legal development began unfolding: The New York Times...

Meta Warns of 8 Spyware Firms Targeting iOS, Android, and Windows Devices

Meta Platforms said it took a series of steps to curtail malicious activity from eight different firms based in Italy, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates U.A.E. operating in the surveillance-for-hire industry. The findings are part of its Adversarial Threat Report for the fourth quarter of 2023...

The Web Scraping Problem, Part 3: Protecting Against Botnets

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The Web Scraping Problem, Part 2: Use Cases that Require Scraping

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The Web Scraping Problem: Part 1

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Valid8Proxy - Tool Designed For Fetching, Validating, And Storing Working Proxies

Valid8Proxy is a versatile and user-friendly tool designed for fetching, validating, and storing working proxies. Whether you need proxies for web scraping, data anonymization, or testing network security, Valid8Proxy simplifies the process by providing a seamless way to obtain reliable and...

PhantomCrawler - Boost Website Hits By Generating Requests From Multiple Proxy IPs

PhantomCrawler allows users to simulate website interactions through different proxy IP addresses. It leverages Python, requests, and BeautifulSoup to offer a simple and effective way to test website behaviour under varied proxy configurations. Features: Utilizes a list of proxy IP addresses from...

Shifting from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

We are adding another CAPTCHA vendor and helping our customers migrate from Googles reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha. Why We Are Making This Change We continuously evaluate our security measures to ensure they align with the evolving landscape of threats. After carefully evaluating several different CAPTCHA...

Is Web Scraping Illegal? Depends on Who You Ask

Web scraping has existed for a long time, and depending on who you ask, it can be loved or hated. But where is the line drawn between extracting data for legitimate business purposes and malicious data extraction that hurts business? The bar is getting blurrier by the day, and the introduction of...

Why Bad Bots Are the Digital Demons of the Internet

In the dimly lit corners of the internet, where shadows flicker and eerie silences prevail, there lurks entities of malevolent intent. They are not the stuff of old wives tales or campfire ghost stories. We’re talking about bad bots, the digital bogeymen of the digital age. These nefarious beings...

2023 OWASP Top-10 Series: API6:2023 Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows

Welcome to the 7th post in our weekly series on the new 2023 OWASP API Security Top-10 list, with a particular focus on security practitioners. This post will focus on API6:2023 Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows. In this series we are taking an in-depth look at each category – the...

2.6 million DuoLingo users have scraped data released

An unknown party has released the scraped data of 2.6 million DuoLingo users on a hacking forum. While they offered the data set for sale in January for $1,500, it's now been released on a new version of the Breached hacking forum for 8 site credits, worth only $2.13. DuoLingo is an educational...

API Abuse – Lessons from the Duolingo Data Scraping Attack

It’s been reported that 2.6 million user records sourced from the Duolingo app are for sale. The attacker apparently obtained them from an open API provided by the company. There’s a more technical explanation available here. While we talk a lot about the vulnerabilities in the OWASP API Top-10 a...

Overcoming web scraping blocks: Best practices and considerations

By Owais Sultan At its core, web scraping involves automatically extracting data from websites, enabling individuals and organizations to obtain valuable… This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Overcoming web scraping blocks: Best practices and considerations...

"TootRoot" Mastodon vulnerabilities fixed: Admins, patch now!

One of Twitters big rivals, Mastodon, recently finished fixing four issues which in the worst case allowed for the creation of files on the instances server. Mastodon, whose main selling point is lots of separate communities living on different servers yet still able to communicate, was notified ...

Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission

I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it "scraped 300 billion words from the internet" without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent. On the one hand, I want this to be a protected fair use of public data. On the other...

Introducing Integrated API Abuse Prevention to Combat Bad Bots

In recent years theres been a rise in "API Abuse" attacks, which includes detrimental automated behaviors such as malicious bots, account takeover ATO, credential stuffing, application layer L7 DDoS, data scraping, and more. For instance, in April-2021 malicious actors scraped the personal data o...

Former TikTok exec: Chinese Communist Party had "God mode" entry to US data

A former executive at TikToks parent company ByteDance has claimed in court documents that the Chinese Communist Party CCP had access to TikTok data, despite the data being stored in the US. The allegations were made in a wrongful dismissal lawsuit which was filed in May in the San Francisco...

Thruk Monitoring Web Interface 3.06 - Path Traversal

Exploit Title: Thruk Monitoring Web Interface 3.06 - Path Traversal Date: 08-Jun-2023 Exploit Author: Galoget Latorre @galoget CVE: CVE-2023-34096 Galoget Latorre Vendor Homepage: https://thruk.org/ Software Link: https://github.com/sni/Thruk/archive/refs/tags/v3.06.zip Software Link + Exploit +...

CVEfixes-db

This repository is an offensive tool for collecting and processing CVE Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures data. It is a Python-based tool that collects CVE data from various sources, including the National Vulnerability Database NVD and GitHub, and stores it in a SQLite database. The tool is...