INTRODUCTION
The Growing Threat of Web Scraping – and What It Costs Businesses
Web scraping has become one of the most pervasive – and underreported – cybersecurity
threats facing online businesses today. According to Imperva’s 2023 Bad Bot Report,
automated bots account for nearly 47.4% of all internet traffic, and of that, bad bots – those
designed to scrape, abuse, or attack – represent 30.2% of total web traffic globally. For
industries that rely on real-time pricing, inventory, and listings data, the stakes are especially
high.
The hospitality and travel sector is among the hardest hit. Research by Distil Networks (now
Imperva) found that travel and hospitality websites see some of the highest bot traffic rates
across all industries, with scraping bots often making up 20-40% of site visits. These bots don’t
just steal data – they consume server bandwidth, inflate infrastructure costs, distort analytics,
and in high-frequency cases, cause website downtime that directly impacts revenue.
The financial impact is staggering. Gartner estimates that online businesses lose billions
annually to data theft via scraping, with the cost compounded by brand damage, loss of
competitive pricing advantage, and customer drop-off during outage periods. For a platform
whose core value lies in its curated listing data, a single sustained scraping attack can expose
months of strategic pricing work to competitors within hours.
Modern scraping bots have grown far more sophisticated than the simple crawlers of a decade
ago. Today’s scrapers rotate IP addresses, mimic human browsing behavior, solve CAPTCHAs,
and are often specifically engineered to evade standard Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and
cloud-based DDoS protection tools. This makes them nearly impossible to stop with off-the-shelf
security products alone – and increasingly, businesses are discovering that a custom, behavior
driven approach is the only effective countermeasure.
The Problem No Standard Tool Could Catch
The client is one of India’s leading luxury villa rental platforms, offering curated properties
across premium destinations. Like most fast-growing hospitality businesses, their website holds
their most valuable asset – property listings, pricing, and availability data that drives bookings
and revenue.
When a scraping bot started hitting their site repeatedly, the impact was immediate: their
website kept crashing. Worse, the attacker had built the bot to change its IP address on every
single request, making standard blocking methods useless.
The client reached out to Operisoft Technologies. Within 24 hours, we had a working solution
live on their server – and the attacks stopped.
THE PROBLEM
A Bot That Kept Changing Its Identity
The scraping bot was not your typical automated crawler. It was specifically built to avoid
detection:
- It sent a high volume of requests in rapid succession, putting enough load on the server to cause repeated crashes
- Every request came from a different IP address, so blocking by IP had no lasting effect
- The scraper was quietly copying the client’s listing data – pricing, property details, availability – giving competitors a free view into their business
- Standard cloud-based firewall tools could not flag the traffic because the bot’s behavior did not match typical attack signatures
- Real customers were being affected – the site was slow or unavailable during crash periods, directly hurting bookings
The bot’s IP kept changing with every request. No static blocklist could keep up. The only way to stop it
was to look at how it behaved, not where it was coming from.
OUR SOLUTION
A Custom Detection Agent – Built for This Exact Attack
We did not try to fit this problem into an existing tool. We built something specifically for this
client’s situation.
Our team wrote a lightweight monitoring script that ran directly on their server, watching live web
traffic in real time. Instead of looking at IP addresses, it studied request patterns – how fast
requests came in, which pages were being hit, how the traffic behaved over time.
When the script detected the scraper’s pattern, it blocked that IP immediately. When the bot
switched to a new IP and resumed, the pattern showed up again – and it was blocked again.
The script adapted continuously, staying ahead of the attacker without needing any manual intervention.
- Built and deployed entirely within 24 hours of the initial call
- Ran directly on the client’s server with no third-party dependency
- Detected the scraper by its traffic behavior, not its IP address
- Blocked malicious requests in real time, automatically
- Had zero impact on normal visitors browsing the site
KEY OUTCOMES
The Crashes Stopped. The Data Was Secure.
From the moment the script went live, the attack lost its effectiveness. The bot kept trying, kept
switching IPs – and kept getting blocked. The client’s site came back to full stability, and their
listing data stopped being scraped.
There was no disruption to real users throughout the process. The fix worked silently in the
background, exactly as intended.
- Website crashes stopped completely after deployment
- Scraping of listing data was cut off
- Site returned to full availability for real customers
- No legitimate user traffic was blocked or affected
- No ongoing manual work needed – the script ran autonomously
KEY METRICS
By the Numbers
BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
Why This Kind of Attack Happens
In the online travel and hospitality space, data is the product. A platform’s listings, pricing
strategy, and availability windows represent months of curation and business decisions. That
data has real value to competitors.
Scraping attacks in this industry are not random – they are usually deliberate. Someone wants to
know what you are charging, what properties you have, and how your availability looks. With
that information, they can undercut your pricing, copy your catalog, or simply monitor your
business moves.
For a platform like this one – growing quickly and building its brand around unique villa
experiences – protecting that data is not just a technical concern. It is a business one.
This case also shows something worth noting: highly adaptive bots can slip past conventional
firewall rules. When an attacker builds their tool specifically to avoid standard detection
methods, the response has to go deeper than a ruleset. It requires understanding the traffic and
writing logic tailored to what you are actually seeing.
CONCLUSION
Sometimes the Right Solution Has to Be Built From Scratch
This client’s situation was straightforward in one sense – they had a bot problem that was
crashing their site. But solving it required more than switching on a setting or updating a firewall
rule.
We looked at the traffic, understood the pattern, and built a script that addressed the actual
attack. It was ready in under a day, it worked immediately, and it kept working as the attacker
tried different approaches.
That is what Operisoft does: we look at the real problem, not the assumed one, and we build
what the situation actually needs.
We did not try to fit this into an existing product. We looked at exactly what was happening and built the
fix for it.
