Defending Against Abuses, Bots and Fraud on the Internet by 2024

Author:2024
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Companies generally have a service agreement with the service provider if the service is chargeable and provision these activities themselves. The bots will regularly retrieve specific site pages to run some diagnostics. Hundreds of companies exist in this space, such as Akamai Technologies, Catchpoint, and Pingdom.

Media and Entertainment Search Engines and Aggregators This category includes specialized search engines that focus on various media types: news, music, video, and images. News aggregator companies like Mashable.com, Wired.com, or Newsnow.com scrape news outlets’ websites to collect articles, see what is trending, and reference the most relevant content on their sites. Scraped websites may include regional, national, or international news agencies. The referenced content may complement the site's content, and the content displayed to a user may depend on their geolocation and personal preferences based on previously accessed articles. People who click one of the referenced links will be redirected to the site that originally published the content. News agencies should welcome the scraping activity of media and news aggregators since it can increase their audience and thus increase their advertisement revenue when users visit their sites.

RSS Feed Readers Rich Site Summary (RSS), often called Really Simple Syndication, uses standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video. An RSS document (called a feed, web feed, or channel) includes complete or summarized text and metadata, like publishing date and author's name.

RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs. RSS feeds also benefit users who want timely updates from their favorite websites or aggregate data from many sites.

Some Internet services use bots to retrieve information from these RSS feeds and make them available to users.

Financial Aggregators Companies like Mint.com or Plaid offer services that allow users to centralize bank and credit card account management into a single portal. Financial aggregators use botnets to log in to all the user's accounts regularly and retrieve the latest financial information. Users can also transfer money from one account to another from the aggregator's portal. Partnership agreements are typically required between the aggregator and the financial institution since the latter closely monitors any account transaction to prevent fraud.

Stock Market Tickers Many companies or individuals trading securities use bots to get the latest quotes on various stocks to make their buy/sell/hold decisions. The information may be fed into an algorithm that automatically evaluates the market trends and news to decide how to handle specific securities.

Enterprise Data Aggregators Some companies offer scraping services to their customers to gain a competitive edge in the market. These companies are, in effect, like SEO companies, but the data collected and the outcome are more focused on driving the company strategy to gain market share.

As described in Chapter 2, “The Most Common Attacks Using Botnets,” companies that fit this category don't always clearly identify themselves in the User-Agent string and may employ techniques to defeat bot detection features. Depending on how the data is used, this can have a negative business impact on the company receiving the scraping activity.

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