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August 27, 2014
The term data harvesting, or web scraping, has always been a concern for website operators and data publishers. Data harvesting is a process where a small script, also known as a malicious bot, is used to automatically extract large amount of data from websites and use it for other purposes. As a cheap and easy way to collect online data, the technique is often used without permission to steal website information such as text, photos, email addresses, and contact lists.
One method of data harvesting targets databases in particular. The script finds a way to cycle through the records of a database and then download each and every record in the database.
Aside from obvious consequence of data loss, data harvesting can also be detrimental to businesses in other ways:
Various methods are available to help website builders protect different types of online data from being scrapped. For database protection, Caspio provides several tools to help prevent your data from being targeted by malicious bots.
Last but not least, password-protecting your database isn’t designed specifically to prevent data harvesting, but it does limit access to only authorized and trusted users and is another measure to protect your data from unauthorized access.
If you’re interested in knowing more about how to implement security safeguards such as CAPTCHA using the Caspio platform, simply sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. You can also request a project consultation to go over specific features.