41 votes

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

2 comments

  1. [2]
    riQQ
    Link
    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    Interesting bit about smartphones possibly being abused for scraping

    What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

    17 votes
    1. QOAL
      Link Parent
      I would imagine that the click farms have plenty of spare capacity to run a scraper process in the background. And that would be easier to sell access to than the alternative.

      I would imagine that the click farms have plenty of spare capacity to run a scraper process in the background.
      And that would be easier to sell access to than the alternative.

      5 votes