Web scraping extracts valuable and often personal data from websites, web applications, and APIs, using either scraper tools or bots that crawl the web looking for data to capture. Once extracted, data can be used for either good or bad purposes. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at web scraping and the risks that malicious web scraping poses for your business. We’ll compare scraper tools and bots, look at detailed examples of malicious web scraping activities, and explain how to protect yourself against malicious web scraping.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a type of data scraping that extracts data from websites using scraper tools and bots. It is also called website scraping, web content scraping, web harvesting, web data extraction, or web data mining. Web scraping can be performed either manually or via automation, or using a hybrid of the two.
Data—including text, images, video, and structured data (like tables)—can be extracted via web scraping. Such data can, with varying levels of difficulty, be scraped from any kind of website, including static and dynamic websites. The extracted data is then exported as structured data.
When used ethically, like for news or content aggregation, market research, or weather forecasting, web scraping can be beneficial. However, it can be malicious when used for harmful purposes, like price scraping and content scraping (more on these uses later.)
How Does Web Scraping Work?
Web scraping is carried out using a scraper tool or bot, and the basic process is the same for both:
- A person or bad actor deploys a scraper tool on a target website, or installs a bot.
- The scraper tool or bot sends automated requests to the website’s server requesting page-specific HTML code.
- The server responds with the HTML code as requested.
- The scraper tool or bot parses the supplied HTML code and extracts data—including databases—according to user-specific parameters.
- The scraper tool or bot then stores the extracted data in a structured format, such as a JSON or CSV file, for later use.
There are three scraping techniques: automated, manual, and hybrid. Manual scraping is the process of extracting data from websites manually, typically by copying and pasting or using web scraping tools that require human intervention. Automated scraping involves using software tools to extract data automatically from websites. Hybrid scraping combines both manual and automated techniques: manual methods are used to handle complex or dynamic elements of a website; automation is used for repetitive and simple tasks.
What Are Scraper Tools and Bots?
Scraper tools and bots are software programs designed to automatically extract data from websites by navigating through web pages and collecting the desired information. Scraper tools and bots can both facilitate large-scale, high-speed web scraping. They are easily confused because they can serve the same purpose—in this case, web scraping. However, scraper tools and bots are actually two different things.
Scraper tools are tools specifically developed for web scraping purposes. Bots are general-purpose software that can be designed to perform a variety of automated tasks, including web scraping. Let’s take a look at each in turn.
What Are Scraper Tools?
Scraper tools, also known as web scrapers, are programs, software, or pieces of code designed specifically to scrape or extract data. They feature a user interface and are typically built using programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Node.js, Golang, PHP, or Perl.
There are four classes of scraper tools:
- Open-source/pre-built web scrapers (e.g., BeautifulSoup, Scrapy)
- Off-the-shelf web scrapers (e.g., Import.io, ParseHub)
- Cloud web scrapers (e.g., Apify, ScrapingBee)
- Browser extension web scrapers (e.g., WebScraper.io, DataMiner)
As these tool classes suggest, scraper tools can be run as desktop applications or on a cloud server. They can be deployed using headless browsers, proxy servers, and mobile applications. Most options are free and do not require any coding or programming knowledge, making them easily accessible.
Scraper tools can also be categorized by their use case:
- Search engine scrapers (e.g., Google Search API, SERP API, Scrapebox)
- Social media scrapers (e.g., ScrapeStorm, PhantomBuster, Sociality.io)
- Image scrapers (e.g., Image Scraper, Google Images Download, Bing Image Search API)
- Ecommerce scrapers (e.g., Price2Spy, SellerSprite, Import.io)
- Video scrapers (e.g., YouTube Data API, Vimeo API, Dailymotion API)
- Web scraping frameworks or libraries (e.g., BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Puppeteer)
- Music lyrics scrapers (e.g., LyricsGenius, Lyric-Scraper)
What Are Bots?
Unlike scraper tools that are specifically designed for web scraping, bots or robots are software/programs that can automate a wide range of tasks. They can gather weather updates, automate social media updates, generate content, process transactions—and also perform web scraping. Bots can be good or bad. Check out our article on good and bad bots and how to manage them for more information.
Bots don’t have a user interface, and are typically written in popular programming languages like Python, Java, C++, Lisp, Clojure, or PHP. Some bots can automate web scraping at scale and simultaneously cover their tracks by using different techniques like rotating proxies and CAPTCHA solving. Highly sophisticated bots can even scrape dynamic websites. Evidently, bots are powerful tools, whether for good or for bad.
Examples of good bots include:
- Chatbots (e.g., Facebook Messenger, ChatGPT)
- Voice bots (e.g., Siri, Alexa)
- Aggregators or news bots (e.g., Google News, AP News)
- Ecommerce bots (e.g., Keepa, Rakuten Slice)
- Search engine crawlers (e.g., Googlebot, Bingbot)
- Site monitoring bots (e.g., Uptime Robot, Pingdom)
- Social media crawlers (e.g., Facebook crawler, Pinterest crawler)
Examples of bad bots include:
- Content scrapers (more on these later)
- Spam bots (e.g., email spam bots, comment spam bots, forum spam bots)
- Account takeover bots (e.g., SentryMBA [credential stuffing], Medusa [brute-force bot], Spyrix Keylogger [credential harvesting bots])
- Social media bots (e.g., bot followers, Like/Retweet bots, political bot squads)
- Click fraud bots (e.g., Hummingbad, 3ve/Methuselah, Methbot)
- DDoS bots (e.g., Reaper/IoTroop, LizardStresser, XOR DDoS)
Comparison of Scraper Tools vs Bots
Scraper tools and bots can both perform web scraping, but have important differences. Let’s check out the differences between scraper tools and bots.
| Criteria | Scraper Tool | Bot |
| Purpose | Automated web scraping | Autonomous task automation for web scraping or other purposes |
| User Interface | User interface (UI), command line | No UI, standalone script |
| Technical skills | Some programming and web scraping know-how (no-code options available) | Advanced programming and web scraping know-how |
| Programming language | Python, Ruby, Node.js, Golang, PHP, and Perl | Python, Java, C++, Lisp, Clojure, and PHP |
| Good or bad | Depends on intent and approach | Good bots and bad bots both exist |
| Examples | BeautifulSoup, Scrapy | Googlebot, BingBot, Botnet |
| Benign use case | Weather forecast, price recommendation, job listings | Search engine indexing, ChatGPT, Siri/Alexa |
| Malicious use case | Web content scraping, price scraping | Spamming, DoS/DDoS, botnets |
What Is Malicious Web Scraping?
Malicious web scraping refers to any undesirable, unauthorized, or illegal use of web scraping. Examples include:
- Any unauthorized web scraping
- Web scraping that violates terms of service
- Web scraping that is used to facilitate other types of malicious attacks
- Any activity that causes severe negative effects to a server or service, including the one being scraped
This table will help you to determine if a particular web scraping activity is benign or malicious.
| Criteria | Consideration | Benign web scraping | Malicious web scraping |
| Authorization | Was approval granted before web scraping? | Yes | No |
| Intent | What was the original purpose for this web scraping? | Good | Bad |
| Approach | How was the web scraping carried out? | Ethically, harmless | Unethically, harmful |
| Impact | What was the impact of the web scraping approach on the scraped server or site? | None/slight | Severe |
Sometimes, even with authorization and good intent, the approach to carrying out web scraping may be inappropriate, resulting in a severe impact on the server or services being scraped.
Examples of Malicious Web Scraping
Malicious web scraping can seriously harm any business. It is important to know what to look out for so you can identify any cases of web scraping that could negatively affect your business. Here are some examples of malicious web scraping activities.
| Type | Activity | Intent |
| Social media user profile scraping | Scraping social media platforms to extract user profiles or personal information | Targeted advertising, identity profiling, identity theft |
| Healthcare data extraction | Scraping healthcare provider websites to access patient records, SSN, and medical information | Identity theft, blackmail, credit card fraud |
| API scraping | Scraping web or mobile app APIs | Reverse engineering or maliciously cloning apps |
| Email/contact scraping | Scraping email addresses and contact information from web pages | Spamming, phishing/smishing, malware distribution |
| Reviews/rating manipulation | Scraping reviews and rating sites or services | Posting fake positive reviews for self or fake negative reviews against competitors |
| Personal data harvesting | Scraping personal information like SSN, date of birth, and credit card details | Identity theft, impersonation, credit card fraud |
| Ad fraud scraping | Scraping advertising networks and platforms looking for ad placements | False ad impressions, click fraud |
| Protected content scraping | Scraping protected or gated content | Targeting log-in credentials and credit card information |
| Web scraping for malware distribution | Scraping content to create spoofing/phishing sites | Distributing malware disguised as software downloads |
| Automated account creation | Creating fake user accounts using web scraping techniques and credential stuffing | Spamming, account fraud, social engineering |
| Price scraping | Scraping ecommerce websites to gather pricing information | Undercutting competitors, scalping, anti-competitive practices |
Malicious web scraping can have significant negative impacts on websites and businesses. It can lead to server overload, website downtime and outage, lost revenue, damaged reputation, and legal action, as in the case of Regal Health in 2023.
What Is Price Scraping?
Price scraping is a prime example of malicious web scraping, in which pricing information is harvested from a site—for instance, an ecommerce site, travel portal, or ticketing agency. This is usually done to undercut the competition and gain an unfair price advantage.
How Price Scraping Impacts Businesses
There are several ways that price scraping can harm businesses:
- Unscrupulous competitors deploy price scraping bots to monitor and extract real-time pricing and inventory data from the competition. This puts pressure on servers and can lead to service disruption or website outage, resulting in poor user experience, cart abandonment, and non-conversion. Crashes caused by price scraping may account for up to 13% of abandoned carts.
- If customers already visited your competitor’s sites, retargeting ads can offer them the same products, redirecting your customers to your competitor’s site.
- Competitors who scrape pricing information can lure buyers by setting their own prices lower than yours in a marketplace. They will then rank higher on price comparison websites.
- Competitors can use price-scraped data for scalping. Scalping is the practice of buying large quantities of a popular product—often through automated systems or bots—and reselling them at a higher price.
- Scraper bots can pull data from hidden but unsecured databases, like customer and email lists. If your customer list and email list are scraped, your customers can end up becoming targets of coordinated malicious attacks or direct advertising from your competitors.
- Scraped data can be used to create a knock-off, replica, or spoofing site with a similar name e.g., www.aliexpresss.com for www.aliexpress.com (this is called typosquatting.) The spoofing site can then be used for phishing, for example by capturing and stealing the login credentials of unsuspecting buyers who mistakenly enter the wrong URL.
- Spoofing sites can be used to steal credit card information from users who complete checkout. But these customers will either never get what they paid for, or instead receive a knock-off, low-quality version. This can damage seller credibility and reputation, generate negative reviews, and land your website in the Ripoff Report.
Some of the most spoofed brands include (in no particular order):
- DHL
- FedEx
- PayPal
- A spoofing site impersonating your brand, armed with your pricing and product data, can field exorbitant prices and generate fake negative reviews. They can even flood the fake site with other malicious content to discredit your brand and misinform potential customers.
What Is Content Scraping?
Let’s look at another form of malicious web scraping. Content scraping is a form of web scraping where content is extracted from websites using specialized scraper tools and bots. For example, a website’s entire blog can be scraped and republished elsewhere without attribution or without using rel=canonical or noindex tags.
Examples of abusive scraping include:
- Copying and republishing content from other sites, without adding original content or value or citing the original source
- Copying content from other sites, slightly modifying it, and republishing it without attribution
- Reproducing content feeds from other sites
- Embedding or compiling content from other sites
How Content Scraping Impacts Businesses
There are several ways that content scraping can harm businesses:
- Your content can be copy-pasted verbatim without credit, meaning that the scraper site takes credit for your hard work.
- Your entire website(s) could be cloned using content scraping techniques, which can be used maliciously to spoof users for phishing.
- Your customers into giving away personal information like credit card details or social security numbers (SSN) via typosquatting. This method was used by convicted felon, Hushpuppi, who engaged in widespread cyber fraud and business email compromise schemes.
- If your website is spoofed, fake bot traffic could commit click fraud and ad fraud. This strategy can make it look like your business itself is engaged in click or ad fraud.
- Your SEO rankings could be damaged if content scraping makes you compete for visibility and organic traffic against your own duplicate content. If you’re outranked by duplicate content, you may lose revenue to criminals profiting from your hard work. Google does countermeasures in place, but they are not 100% guaranteed.
- If content scraping on your website or online assets results in a data breach, you risk facing a class action lawsuit, paying damages, and losing hard-earned customer trust and loyalty.
How to Protect Against Web Scraping
To protect your website against web scraping, you can implement a number of robust security measures. We can sort these techniques into two categories: DIY and advanced. On the DIY end, you might already be familiar with CAPTCHA, rate limiting (limiting the number of requests a user can send to your server in a given time period), and user behavior analysis to detect and block suspicious activities.
More advanced techniques include server-side techniques such as regularly changing HTML structures, hiding or encrypting certain data, and ensuring you have a strong, updated robots.txt file that clearly states what bots are allowed to do on your website.
However, two major challenges to preventing web scraping exist. Firstly, some web scraping prevention methods can also impact real users and legitimate crawlers. Secondly, scraper tools and bots are becoming more sophisticated and better at evading detection, for example, by using rotating proxies or CAPTCHA solving to cover their tracks.
DIY Protection Measures Against Web Scraping
Below is a table of DIY protective measures that you can immediately take to prevent or minimize web scraping activities, especially price scraping and content scraping.
| Step number | Action | Description |
| 1 | Stay updated | Track the latest web scraping techniques by following blogs (like ScraperAPI or Octoparse) that teach them |
| 2 | Search for your own content | Search for phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in your post enclosed in quotes |
| 3 | Use plagiarism checkers | Copyscape lets you search for copies of your web pages by URL or by copy-pasting text |
| 4 | Check for typosquatting | Regularly check for misspellings of your domain name to prevent content theft and typo hijacking |
| 5 | Implement CAPTCHA (but don’t include the solution in the HTML markup) | CAPTCHA differentiates humans from bots using puzzles bots can’t ordinarily solve. Google’s reCAPTCHA is a good option. |
| 6 | Set up notifications for pingbacks on WordPress sites | Pingback notifications alert you to use of your published backlinks and allow you to manually approve which of those sites can link to yours. This helps to prevent link spam and low-quality backlinks. |
| 7 | Set up Google Alerts | Get notified whenever phrases or terms that you’re using often get mentioned anywhere on the web. |
| 8 | Gate your content | Put content behind a paywall or form, requiring sign-in to gain access. Confirm new account sign-ups by email. |
| 9 | Monitor unusual activity | An excessive number of requests, page views, or searches from one IP address might indicate bot activity. Monitor this via network requests to your site or using integrated web analytics tools like Google Analytics. |
| 10 | Implement rate limiting | Allow users and verified scrapers a limited number of actions per time. This limits network traffic. |
| 11 | Block scraping services | Block access from IP addresses of known scraping services, but mask the real reason for the block. |
| 13 | Create a honeypot | Honeypots are virtual traps or decoys set up to distract or fool malicious bots and learn how they work. |
| 14 | Update your website/API | Dynamic websites and updated HTML/APIs make it harder for malicious bots to scrape content. |
| 15 | Disallow web scraping | Enact via your robots.txt file (e.g., www.yourURL.com/robots.txt), terms of service, or a legal warning. |
| 16 | Contact, then report offenders | Reach out to the content thief letting them know they’re in violation of your terms of service. You can also file a DMCA takedown request. |
While these DIY measures can help, their impact is limited in the face of ever-evolving threats like web scraping. Advanced, enterprise-grade web scraping protections are more effective, ensuring the security, integrity, and competitive edge that your site offers customers.
Advanced Protection Measures Against Web Scraping
Advanced web scraping solutions like WAF and bot protection provide enterprise-grade web scraping protection. They help to further protect your assets against unethical web scraping and can be used in conjunction with bot management best practices and other DIY anti-scraping measures.
- Web application firewall (WAF): A comprehensive WAF protects your web applications and APIs against OWASP Top 10 and zero-day attacks. A web application firewall acts as an intermediary, detecting and scanning malicious requests before web applications and servers accept them and respond to them. This helps to protect your web servers and users.
As a Layer 7 defense, Gcore’s WAF employs real-time monitoring and advanced machine-learning techniques to secure your web applications and APIs against cyber threats such as credentials theft, unauthorized access, data leaks, and web scraping.
- Bot protection: Effective bot protection prevents server overload resulting from aggressive bot traffic/activity. A bot protection service uses a set of algorithms to isolate and remove unwanted bot traffic that has already infiltrated your perimeter. This is essential for preventing attacks like web scraping, account takeover, and API data scraping.
Gcore’s comprehensive bot protection service offers clients best-in-class L3/L4/L7 protection across their networks, transports, and application layers. Users can also choose between low-level or high-level bot protection. Low-level bot protection uses quantitative analytics to detect and block suspicious sessions while high-level bot protection utilizes a rate limiter and additional checks to safeguard your servers.
Bot protection is highly effective against web scraping, account takeover, form submission abuse, API data scraping, and TLS session attacks. It helps you to maintain uninterrupted service even during intense attacks, allowing you to focus on running your business while mitigating the threats. Bot protection is customizable, quick to deploy, and cost effective.
Conclusion
Web scraping protection is essential for all businesses because it ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your business and customer data. Unethical web scraping poses a serious threat to this ideal by using malicious scraper tools and bots to access and extract data without permission.
Gcore’s advanced WAF and bot protection solutions offer advanced protection against web scraping. Try our advanced web scraping protection services for free today and protect your web resources and customers from malicious web scraping activities of any size and complexity.
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One of the most played video games in the world, Minecraft, relies on servers that are frequently a target of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. But why would malicious actors target Minecraft servers? In this article, we’ll look at why these servers are so prone to DDoS attacks and uncover the impact such attacks have on the gaming community and broader cybersecurity landscape. For a comprehensive analysis and expert tips, read our ultimate guide to preventing DDoS attacks on Minecraft servers.Disruption for financial gainFinancial exploitation is a typical motivator for DDoS attacks in Minecraft. Cybercriminals frequently demand ransom to stop their attacks. Server owners, especially those with lucrative private or public servers, may feel pressured to pay to restore normalcy. In some cases, bad actors intentionally disrupt competitors to draw players to their own servers, leveraging downtime for monetary advantage.Services that offer DDoS attacks for hire make these attacks more accessible and widespread. These malicious services target Minecraft servers because the game is so popular, making it an attractive and easy option for attackers.Player and server rivalriesRivalries within the Minecraft ecosystem often escalate to DDoS attacks, driven by competition among players, servers, hosts, and businesses. Players may target opponents during tournaments to disrupt their gaming experience, hoping to secure prize money for themselves. Similarly, players on one server may initiate attacks to draw members to their server and harm the reputation of other servers. Beyond individual players, server hosts also engage in DDoS attacks to disrupt and induce outages for their rivals, subsequently attempting to poach their customers. On a bigger scale, local pirate servers may target gaming service providers entering new markets to harm their brand and hold onto market share. These rivalries highlight the competitive and occasionally antagonistic character of the Minecraft community, where the stakes frequently surpass in-game achievements.Personal vendettas and retaliationPersonal conflicts can occasionally be the source of DDoS attacks in Minecraft. In these situations, servers are targeted in retribution by individual gamers or disgruntled former employees. These attacks are frequently the result of complaints about unsolved conflicts, bans, or disagreements over in-game behavior. Retaliation-driven DDoS events can cause significant disruption, although lower in scope than attacks with financial motivations.Displaying technical masterySome attackers carry out DDoS attacks to showcase their abilities. Minecraft is a perfect testing ground because of its large player base and community-driven server infrastructure. Successful strikes that demonstrate their skills enhance reputations within some underground communities. Instead of being a means to an end, the act itself becomes a badge of honor for those involved.HacktivismHacktivists—people who employ hacking as a form of protest—occasionally target Minecraft servers to further their political or social goals. These attacks are meant to raise awareness of a subject rather than be driven by personal grievances or material gain. To promote their message, they might, for instance, assault servers that are thought to support unfair policies or practices. This would be an example of digital activism. Even though they are less frequent, these instances highlight the various reasons why DDoS attacks occur.Data theftMinecraft servers often hold significant user data, including email addresses, usernames, and sometimes even payment information. Malicious actors sometimes launch DDoS attacks as a smokescreen to divert server administrators’ attention from their attempts to breach the server and steal confidential information. This dual-purpose approach disrupts gameplay and poses significant risks to user privacy and security, making data theft one of the more insidious motives behind such attacks.Securing the Minecraft ecosystemDDoS attacks against Minecraft are motivated by various factors, including personal grudges, data theft, and financial gain. Every attack reveals wider cybersecurity threats, interferes with gameplay, and damages community trust. Understanding these motivations can help server owners take informed steps to secure their servers, but often, investing in reliable DDoS protection is the simplest and most effective way to guarantee that Minecraft remains a safe and enjoyable experience for players worldwide. By addressing the root causes and improving server resilience, stakeholders can mitigate the impact of such attacks and protect the integrity of the game.Gcore offers robust, multi-layered security solutions designed to shield gaming communities from the ever-growing threat of DDoS attacks. Founded by gamers for gamers, Gcore understands the industry’s unique challenges. Our tools enable smooth gameplay and peace of mind for both server owners and players.Want an in-depth look at how to secure your Minecraft servers?Download our ultimate guide
What is a DDoS attack?
A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack is a type of cyberattack in which a hacker overwhelms a server with an excessive number of requests, causing the server to stop functioning properly. This can cause the website, app, game, or other online service to become slow, unresponsive, or completely unavailable. DDoS attacks can result in lost customers and revenue for the victim. DDoS attacks are becoming increasingly common, with a 46% increase in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.How do DDoS attacks work?DDoS attacks work by overwhelming and flooding a company’s resources so that legitimate users cannot get through. The attacker creates huge amounts of malicious traffic by creating a botnet, a collection of compromised devices that work together to carry out the attack without the device owners’ knowledge. The attacker, referred to as the botmaster, sends instructions to the botnet in order to implement the attack. The attacker forces these bots to send an enormous amount of internet traffic to a victim’s resource. As a result, the server can’t process real users trying to access the website or app. This causes customer dissatisfaction and frustration, lost revenue, and reputational damage for companies.Think of it this way: Imagine a vast call center. Someone dials the number but gets a busy tone. This is because a single spammer has made thousands of automated calls from different phones. The call center’s lines are overloaded, and the legitimate callers cannot get through.DDoS attacks work similarly, but online: The fraudster’s activity completely blocks the end users from reaching the website or online service.Different types of DDoS attacksThere are three categories of DDoS attacks, each attacking a different network communication layer. These layers come from the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, the foundational framework for network communication that describes how different systems and devices connect and communicate. This model has seven layers. DDoS attacks seek to exploit vulnerabilities across three of them: L3, L4, and L7.While all three types of attacks have the same end goal, they differ in how they work and which online resources they target. L3 and L4 DDoS attacks target servers and infrastructure, while L7 attacks affect the app itself.Volumetric attacks (L3) overwhelm the network equipment, bandwidth, or server with a high volume of traffic.Connection protocol attacks (L4) target the resources of a network-based service, like website firewalls or server operating systems.Application layer attacks (L7) overwhelm the network layer, where the application operates with many malicious requests, which leads to application failure.1. Volumetric attacks (L3)L3, or volumetric, DDoS attacks are the most common form of DDoS attack. They work by flooding internal networks with malicious traffic, aiming to exhaust bandwidth and disrupt the connection between the target network or service and the internet. By exploiting key communication protocols, attackers send massive amounts of traffic, often with spoofed IP addresses, to overwhelm the victim’s network. As the network equipment strains to process this influx of data, legitimate requests are delayed or dropped, leading to service degradation or even complete network failure.2. Connection protocol attacks (L4)Protocol attacks occur when attackers send connection requests from multiple IP addresses to target server open ports. One common tactic is a SYN flood, where attackers initiate connections without completing them. This forces the server to allocate resources to these unfinished sessions, quickly leading to resource exhaustion. As these fake requests consume the server’s CPU and memory, legitimate traffic is unable to get through. Firewalls and load balancers managing incoming traffic can also be overwhelmed, resulting in service outages.3. Application layer attacks (L7)Application layer attacks strike at the L7 layer, where applications operate. Web applications handle everything from simple static websites to complex platforms like e-commerce sites, social media networks, and SaaS solutions. In an L7 attack, a hacker deploys multiple bots or machines to repeatedly request the same resource until the server becomes overwhelmed.By mimicking genuine user behavior, attackers flood the web application with seemingly legitimate requests, often at high rates. For example, they might repeatedly submit incorrect login credentials or overload the search function by continuously searching for products. As the server consumes its resources managing these fake requests, genuine users experience slow response times or may be completely denied access to the application.How can DDoS attacks be prevented?To stay one step ahead of attackers, use a DDoS protection solution to protect your web resources. A mitigation solution detects and blocks harmful DDoS traffic sent by attackers, keeping your servers and applications safe and functional. If an attacker targets your server, your legitimate users won’t notice any change—even during a considerable attack—because the protection solution will allow safe traffic while identifying and blocking malicious requests.DDoS protection providers also give you reports on attempted DDoS attacks. This way, you can track when the attack happened, as well as the size and scale of the attack. This enables you to respond effectively, analyze the potential implications of the attack, and implement risk management strategies to mitigate future disruptions.Repel DDoS attacks with GcoreAt Gcore, we offer robust and proven security solutions to protect your business from DDoS attacks. Gcore DDoS Protection provides comprehensive mitigation at L3, L4, and L7 for websites, apps, and servers. We also offer L7 protection as part of Gcore WAAP, which keeps your web apps and APIs secure against a range of modern threats using AI-enabled threat detection.Take a look at our recent Radar report to learn more about the latest DDoS attack trends and the changing strategies and patterns of cyberattacks.Read our DDoS Attack Trends Radar report
How to Spot and Stop a DDoS Attack
The faster you detect and resolve a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, the less damage it can do to your business. Read on to learn how to identify the signs of a DDoS attack, differentiate it from other issues, and implement effective protection strategies to safeguard your business. You’ll also discover why professional mitigation is so important for your business.The Chronology of a DDoS AttackThe business impact of a DDoS attack generally increases the longer it continues. While the first few minutes might not be noticeable without a dedicated solution with monitoring capabilities, your digital services could be taken offline within an hour. No matter who your customer is or how you serve them, every business stands to lose customers, credibility, and revenue through downtime.The First Few Minutes: Initial Traffic SurgeAttackers often start with a low-volume traffic flow to avoid early detection. This phase, known as pre-flooding, evaluates the target system’s response and defenses. You may notice a slight increase in traffic, but it could still be within the range of normal fluctuations.Professional DDoS mitigation services use algorithms to spot these surges, identify whether the traffic increase is malicious, and stop attacks before they can have an impact. Without professional protection, it’s almost impossible to spot this pre-flooding phase, leading you into the following phases of an attack.The First Hour: Escalating TrafficThe attack will quickly escalate, resulting in a sudden and extreme increase in traffic volume. During this stage, network performance will start to degrade noticeably, causing unusually slow loading times for websites and services.Look out for network disconnections, or unusually slow performance. These are telltale signs of a DDoS attack in its early stages.The First Few Hours: Service DisruptionAs the attack intensifies, the website may become completely inaccessible. You might experience an increased volume of spam emails as part of a coordinated effort to overwhelm your systems. Frequent loss of connectivity within the local network can occur as the attack overloads the infrastructure.You can identify this stage by looking for website or network unavailability. Users will experience continuous problems when trying to connect to the targeted application or server.Within 24 Hours: Sustained ImpactIf the attack continues, the prolonged high traffic volume will cause extended service outages and significant slowdowns. By this point, it is clear that a DDoS attack is in progress, especially if multiple indicators are present simultaneously.By now, not only is your website and/or network unavailable, but you’re also at high risk of data breaches due to the loss of control of your digital resources.Distinguishing DDoS Attacks from Other IssuesWhile DDoS attack symptoms like slow performance and service outages are common, they can also be caused by other problems. Here’s how to differentiate between a DDoS attack and other issues:AspectDDoS attackHosting problemsLegitimate traffic spikeSoftware issuesTraffic volumeSudden, extreme increaseNo significant increaseHigh but expected during peaksNormal, higher, lower, or zeroService responseExtremely slow or unavailableSlow or intermittentSlower but usually functionalErratic, with specific errorsError messagesFrequent Service UnavailableInternal Server Error, TimeoutNo specific errors, slower responsesSpecific to the softwareDurationProlonged, until mitigatedVaries, often until resolvedTemporary, during peaks, often predictableVaries based on the bugSource of trafficMultiple, distributed, malicious signaturesConsistent with normal traffic, localizedGeographically diverse, consistent patternsDepends on the user baseProtective Strategies Against DDoS AttacksPrevention is the best defense against DDoS attacks. Here are some strategies to protect your business:Content delivery networks (CDNs): CDNs distribute your traffic across multiple servers worldwide, reducing the load on any single server and mitigating the impact of DDoS attacks.DDoS protection solutions: These services provide specialized tools to detect, mitigate, and block DDoS attacks. They continuously monitor traffic patterns in real time to detect anomalies and automatically respond to and stop attacks without manual intervention.Web application and API protection (WAAP): WAAP solutions protect web applications and APIs from a wide range of threats, including DDoS attacks. They use machine learning and behavioral analysis to detect and block sophisticated attacks, from DDoS assaults to SQL injections.Gcore provides all three protection strategies in a single platform, offering your business the security it needs to thrive in a challenging threat landscape.Don’t Delay, Protect Your Business NowGcore provides comprehensive DDoS protection, keeping your services online and your business thriving even during an attack. Explore Gcore DDoS Protection or get instant protection now.Discover the latest DDoS trends and threats in our H3 2023 report
Improve Your Privacy and Data Security with TLS Encryption on CDN
The web is a public infrastructure: Anyone can use it. Encryption is a must to ensure that communications over this public infrastructure are secure and private. You don’t want anyone to read or modify the data you send or receive, like credit card information when paying for an online service.TLS encryption is a basic yet crucial safeguard that ensures only the client (the user’s device, like a laptop) and server can read your request and response data; third parties are locked out. You can run TLS on a CDN for improved performance, caching, and TLS management. If you want to learn more about TLS and how running it on a CDN can improve your infrastructure, this is the right place to start.What Is TLS Encryption and Why Does It Matter?TLS, transport layer security, encrypts data sent via the web to prevent it from being seen or changed while it’s in transit. For that reason, it’s called encryption in-transit technology. TLS is also commonly called HTTPS when used with HTTP or SSL, as previous versions of the technology were based on it. TLS ensures high encryption performance and forward secrecy. To learn more about encryption, check out our dedicated article.TLS is a vital part of the web because it ensures trust for end users and search engines alike. End users can rest assured that their data—like online banking information or photos of their children—can’t be accessed. Search engines know that information protected by TLS is trustworthy, so they rate it higher than non-protected content.What’s the Connection Between TLS and CDN?A CDN, or content delivery network, helps improve your website’s performance by handling the delivery of your content from its own servers rather than your website’s server. When a CDN uses TLS, it ensures that your content is encrypted as it travels from your server to the CDN and from the CDN to your users.With TLS offloading, your server only needs to encrypt the content for each CDN node, not for every individual user. This reduces the workload on your server.Here’s a simple breakdown of how it works:Your server encrypts the content once and sends it to the CDN.The CDN caches this encrypted content.When a user requests the content, the CDN serves it directly to them, handling all encryption and reducing the need to repeatedly contact your server.Without a CDN, your server would have to encrypt and send content to each user individually, which can slow things down. With a CDN, your server encrypts the content once for the CDN. The CDN then takes over, encrypting and serving the content to all users, speeding up the process and reducing the load on your server.Figure 1: Comparison of how content is served with TLS on the web server (left) vs on CDN (right)Benefits of “Offloading” TLS to a CDNOffloading TLS to a CDN can improve your infrastructure with improved performance, better caching, and simplified TLS management.Increased PerformanceWhen establishing a TLS connection, the client and server must exchange information to negotiate a session key. This exchange involves four messages being sent over the network, as shown in Figure 2. The higher the latency between the two participants, the longer it takes to establish the connection. CDN nodes are typically closer to the client, resulting in lower latency and faster connection establishment.As mentioned above, CDN nodes handle all the encryption tasks. This frees up your server’s resources for other tasks and allows you to simplify its code base.Figure 2: TLS handshakeImproved CachingIf your data is encrypted, the CDN can’t cache it. A single file will look different from the CDN nodes for every new TLS connection, eliminating the CDN benefits (Figure 3). If the CDN holds the certificates, it can negotiate encryption with the clients and collect the files from your server in plaintext. This allows the CDN to cache the content efficiently and serve it faster to users.Figure 3: TLS and CDN caching comparedSimplified TLS ManagementThe CDN takes care of maintenance tasks such as certificate issuing, rotation, and auto-renewal. With the CDN managing TLS, your server’s code base can be simplified, and you no longer need to worry about potential TLS updates in the future.TLS Encryption with Gcore CDNWith the Gcore CDN we don’t just take care of your TLS encryption, but also file compression and DNS lookups. This way, you can unburden your servers from non-functional requirements, which leads to smaller, easier-to-maintain code bases, lower CPU, memory, and traffic impact, and a lower workload for the teams managing those servers.Gcore CDN offers two TLS offloading options:Free Let’s Encrypt certificates with automatic validation, an effective and efficient choice for simple security needsPaid custom certificates, ideal if your TLS setup has more complex requirementsHow to Enable HTTPS with a Free Let’s Encrypt CertificateSetting up HTTPS for your website is quick, easy, and free. First, make sure you have a Gcore CDN resource for your website. If you haven’t created one yet, you can do so in the Gcore Customer Portal by clicking Create CDN resource in the top-right of the window (Figure 4) and following the setup wizard. You’ll be asked to update your DNS records so they point to the Gcore CDN, allowing Gcore to issue the certificates later.Figure 4: Create CDN resourceNext, open the resource settings by selecting your CDN resource from the list in the center (Figure 5).Figure 5: Select the CDN resourceEnable HTTPS in the resource settings, as shown in Figure 6:Select SSL in the left navigationClick the Enable HTTPS checkboxClick Get SSL certificateFigure 6: Get an SSL certificateYour certificate will usually be issued within 30 minutes.Our Commitment to Online SecurityAt Gcore, we’re committed to making the internet secure for everyone. As part of this mission, we offer free CDN and free TLS certificates. Take advantage and protect your resources efficiently for free!Get TLS encryption on Gcore CDN free
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