Greater Risk of Data Theft and a Growing BotNet Infection Identified in ScrapeSentry Scraping Threat Report 2015
Boston, MA. (PRWEB) June 23, 2015 -- Analysis of ScrapeSentry’s Global Scraping Intelligence Platform, which is the largest database for scraping related activity, has shown another year’s growth in scraping attacks on the six sectors at greatest risk of the activity. Those sectors are Travel, Online Classifieds, Online Directories, Ticketing, Betting and E-Commerce.
Looking at where scraping traffic originates, USA now tops the table, accounting for 49% in 2014. In the previous year, China, USA and Australia combined accounted for 50% of the traffic.
However, this year the report shows that the ratio of total traffic to scraper traffic is worst from traffic originating in China. China accounts for 1.40 % of the total traffic but 17.13 % of the scraper traffic
In the case of the Travel Industry, it has seen scraper numbers more than double from 15% of visitors in 2013 to 33% last year.
The Online Classified sector has seen a similarly dramatic increase from 14% to 30% in the same time frame.
Online Directories suffered from almost a third of visitors being scrapers at 30%, which is up 8% on last year.
Ticketing sites have also seen a big increase in scraping traffic over the year, having it jump from 9% to 27% of visits.
Betting sites experienced high amounts of scraping traffic at 25% in 2014, thanks in part to the World Cup, when in 2013, they saw only 8%.
Seeing the smallest overall increase in scraping activity last year was the general E-Commerce sector, which experienced just a 3% increase in scraping to bring it to 15%.
New to the 2015 report is ScrapeSentry’s identification of a botnet which has infected more than 1.3 million IP addresses over the course of 2014 and is seen to be growing by 10,000 new infections a week.
Highlights from the ScrapeSentry Threat Report 2015 includes
• Increase in overall scraping activity for the fifth year in a row
• 22% of visitors to websites are identified as scrapers (up from 18% last year)
• 17% increase in scraping attacks across all industries in 2014
• The hardest hit site in the survey received 60% of its traffic from scrapers
Martin Zetterlund, Founding Partner of ScrapeSentry commented, “Very recently we’ve seen airlines announce increases in booking fees to tickets booked through third parties, because scraping and the loss of revenue that causes, is a very real threat to their businesses. The 2015 Scraping Threat Report clearly shows the challenges the travel industry, and airlines in particular face.
“We know that the means to scrape is now even more easily sourced and the profits from scraping can be considerable, so the incentive to continue to scrape and to invest in it as a business form in itself grows. Scrapers are not going away, and the threat to online businesses will continue to increase. This year has shown some worrying growth in data theft and we hope that all online businesses, and the ones in the at risk sectors in particular, will take this report as a wake-up call to review how they are being affected by scraping”.
As the world’s first organisation to identify the threat of Web Scraping to online businesses and to develop the solution, ScrapeSentry, is the global leader in anti-scraping and works with many high profile organisations to protect them from scrapers.
The report is available from
https://www.scrapesentry.com/the-scraping-threat-report-2015/
ENDS
For further press information please contact
ScrapeSentryNews(at)gmail(dot)com, or telephone +44 7541497172
Notes to Editors
Definition of Scraping: Scraping (also known as web scraping, screen scraping or data scraping) is where large amounts of data from a web site is copied manually or with a script or program. Scrapers might be copying data to populate their own site, or to pretend to be you to customers or online, or to ensure they price match and better you. Whatever their motive and final use for your data, web scrapers are likely to be competing with site owners for customers. Scraping can also have the unintended (or sometimes the intended) consequence of also slowing access to the scraped site and to customers being unable to complete transactions, so that they abandon the site and go elsewhere.
About ScrapeSentry
ScrapeSentry was founded in 2006, and was the world’s first anti-scraping solution to be developed to protect sites from the loss of Intellectual Property and from data theft. As pioneers in the field, ScrapeSentry has worked with many global businesses, such as easyJet, Ladbrokes, and Autotrader.com to protect them from scraping and all the costs, losses of data, customers and IP as well as the potential losses in the reputational damage, that scraping involves. ScrapeSentry has offices in Stockholm, Sweden, London, UK and Boston, USA. For more information please see http://www.scrapesentry.com.
Mo Murphy, ScrapeSentry, http://www.scrapesentry.com, +44 7541497172, [email protected]
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