Network investigation guide
Investigating Web Scraping Activities
Web scraping is repeated automated retrieval of pages or resources from a web service to collect content at scale.
Understand the finding
What do Web Scraping Activities mean?
Crawlers and monitoring systems scrape sites legitimately every day. Risk increases when an unknown source targets an internal, authenticated, data-rich, or otherwise sensitive application.
Triage workflow
How to investigate Web Scraping Activities
- 1
Identify the source, user agent or process, requested paths, and retrieval rate.
- 2
Classify the target data and determine whether authentication was used.
- 3
Compare the activity with robots policy, approved integrations, and normal client behavior.
- 4
Look for systematic enumeration, sensitive downloads, or evasion such as source rotation.
Interpret the context
Common benign explanations
Finding this behavior does not by itself prove malicious intent. Common explanations include:
- Search-engine, SEO, link-preview, and feed crawlers
- Availability, security, or application monitoring
- Approved aggregators, API clients, and internal search indexers
Make a decision
When to escalate or de-escalate
Escalate when
- The source is unknown and targets sensitive, internal, or authenticated content.
- The pattern suggests systematic harvesting, access-control bypass, or data loss.
De-escalate when
- The source is an approved crawler or integration operating within policy.
- The content is public and the activity has no meaningful operational impact.
Analyze the evidence
Investigate network behavior with Red Hand
Red Hand turns network traffic into a report that identifies meaningful behavior, adds endpoint and process context when available, and provides practical investigation guidance.