In recent years, companies of all sizes have recognized the value of making an online presence. Even small businesses are seeing the potential gains of the online market, with about 71% of them owning a website. To attract more traffic and maximize profits, business owners consider using different tools, some of which are for web scraping.

Essentially, web scraping is the automated collection of data from the internet. In many ways, it can be a blessing to a business, but it can also be a risk. And this article will explain why.

1. What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is data mining from online sites that simulates human behavior by using software to retrieve all available information, typically in HTTP format, from a target web page. The scraper can then copy a portion or all of a website’s content to another destination.

It enables the indexing and organizing of large data sets, allowing behavioral, statistical, and qualitative studies to be performed. For this reason, more and more firms employ scraping tools and bots for their initiatives. Consequently, about 80% of annual e-commerce profitability is affected by web scraping.

The “scraped” data can be applied to many promising practices. This includes availability and transparency. However, it is also prone to be exploited for malicious purposes, such as information abuse and intellectual property theft.

While much of this isn’t illegal, web scraping does fall into a gray area where law and morality are debatable. Nevertheless, it is essential to understand the pros and cons of this double-sided coin.

2. How It Can Be Beneficial

For website owners and developers, web scraping tools save them a lot of resources. That is why well-known cloud providers, such as Amazon AWS, still provide free APIs for secure web scraping. In the right hands, it can help in many ways.

a. Automation

When working with advanced tools like bots, this is the primary benefit. It has simplified data extraction to just a few clicks, and it’s a real-life-saver as it completes the retrieval and processing of large amounts of data in a short amount of time.

You’ll be able to develop a better picture of your market and your competitors’ activity by downloading, cleaning, and analyzing large volumes of data at a fast rate.

b. Accuracy

Aside from being quick, scraping services are also precise, and simple data extraction errors can lead to severe issues later. Therefore, the accuracy of any form of data extraction is critical, and this is especially true for websites that deal with any other type of financial data.

Most humans find repetitive tasks boring, and this is perhaps why mistakes are still made even with the most straightforward assignments. Hence, many leave these kinds of jobs to robots.

c. Fewer Expenses

Manual data extraction is a costly task that demands a big team and a budget. But with automatic scraping tools, the costs can be significantly cut. Because maintenance cost is low and data is processed from the target website as a whole, data mining is now more affordable than ever.

Once the fundamental data extraction process is up and running, you can crawl the entire domain rather than just one or a few pages. This means that the one-time investment in having a scraper can pay off handsomely.

d. Flexibility

Application Programming Interfaces (API) are not hard-coded solutions for web scraping. As a result, they’re highly adaptable, open, and interoperable with other scripts.

All that is required is to design a scraper for a single significant work and then restructure it to fit a variety of tasks by making just minor modifications to the core. You can build up a scraper, an app integration, a monitoring actor, and a deduplication actor within one system.

3. Why It Is Also a Threat

Even if you use web scraping for good reasons, others may not. Web criminals and business rivals can steal your information and use it for various malicious activities using this technology. It is vital to know what risks you may encounter as a business.

a. Phishing Attacks

Compared to hacking into an account, scraping is not as intrusive. However, it can open up the possibility of phishing attacks. Hackers can find out the names of superiors, active initiatives, and partner organizations.

This data can craft clear messages and trick people into giving what the hackers want. They can even steal most of a site’s content and take over its SEO ranking in the search results.

b. Password Cracking

Even if the password isn’t explicitly disclosed, hackers can use it to crack credentials and single bypass factor, or even multifactor, authentication mechanisms using web scraping.

Keep in mind that your employees construct passwords based on their interests, lifestyles, and other characteristics. All of these may be found on social media and other parts of the web. A skilled hacker can use this information to guess passwords, making a cyber-attack easier.

c. Price Scraping

A scraper can access the pricing information to offer a cheaper deal in their shop to boost sales. In this scheme, scraper bots are launched from a botnet to search the databases of business competition.

Web scraping allows competitors to get real-time pricing and promotion alerts, as well as product information and other plans. This can impact your revenue, website traffic, and user experience, among several others.

d. Spamming

Contact scraping is a sort of web scraping that entails searching for and obtaining contact information from a website. Bad bots collect email addresses and phone numbers with the intent of spamming new people.

Nowadays, push marketing strategies like this aren’t effective because people don’t trust them. So even if you don’t practice this type of scraping, but someone steals the contact details of your site’s visitors and spam, your reputation is still in danger.

4. Conclusion

Web scraping can do wonders. But if misused, it can tarnish a brand considerably. Understanding the intrusive nature of this threat not only raises awareness about this expanding danger. It also helps website owners to take steps to protect their proprietary information and their users’ privacy.