A scraper bot crawls your API or website, calling endpoints in rapid sequence to copy your data — user profiles, product listings, pricing, contact details — and export it. Unlike a real user, a scraper has no interest in the UI; it just wants the data underneath.
Think of it this way
Imagine someone walking into your store not to buy anything, but to photograph every price tag, product name, and customer name badge on display — then walking out and selling that information to your competitors. Data scraping is that, but done thousands of times per hour by a bot.
The attacker identifies which API endpoints return useful data — search results, user profiles, product details, pricing. They write a bot that systematically calls those endpoints, often with incremented IDs or paginated requests, extracting and storing the responses. They disguise the traffic by rotating IP addresses, mimicking browser behaviour, and pacing requests to stay under simple rate limits.
Scenario 1
A competitor deploys a scraper that calls your pricing API every hour, automatically adjusting their prices to always be marginally cheaper than yours — without you knowing they have real-time visibility into your pricing.
Scenario 2
A new startup scrapes all 500,000 listings from an established marketplace — including seller contacts, prices, and descriptions — to bootstrap their own competing platform without doing any original work.
Scenario 3
An attacker calls your user search or profile API with every name variation, harvesting email addresses and phone numbers to build a spam or phishing list.
Anomira detects scrapers through abnormally high request rates to data-serving endpoints, sequential patterns in request parameters (incrementing IDs, paginating through all results), near-zero time between requests (non-human pacing), and the absence of standard browser signals.
Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR)
Accessing another user's data by simply changing a number in the URL.
MediumRate Limit Abuse
Hammering your API with far more requests than any legitimate user would make.
MediumAutomated Scanner / Reconnaissance
A bot mapping your API looking for vulnerabilities to exploit later.
See this attack in your live API traffic
Anomira detects data scraping automatically — no configuration needed.