Scraping SSL Labs Server Test Results With R

    NOTE: Qualys allows automated access to their SSL Server Test site in their T&C’s, and the R fucntion/script provided here does its best to adhere to their guidelines. However, if you launch multiple scripts at one time and catch their attention you will, no doubt, be banned.

This post will show you how to do some basic web page data scraping with R. To make it more palatable to those in the security domain, we’ll be scraping the results from Qualys’ SSL Labs SSL Test site by building an R function that will:

    fetch the contents of a URL with RCurl
    process the HTML page tags with R’s XML library
    identify the key elements from the page that need to be scraped
    organize the results into a usable R data structure

You can skip ahead to the code at the end (or in this gist) or read on for some expository that isn’t in the code’s comments.

Setting up the script and processing flow

We’ll need some assistance from three R packages to perform the scraping, processing and transformation tasks:

library(RCurl) # scraping
library(XML)   # XML (HTML) processing
library(plyr)  # data transformation

If you poke at the SSL Test site with a few different URLs, you’ll see there are three primary inputs to the GET request we’ll need to issue:

    d (the domain)
    s (the IP address to test)
    ignoreMismatch (which we’ll leave as ‘on‘)

You’ll also see that there’s often a delay between issuing a request and getting the results, so we’ll need to build in a GET+check-loop (like the javascript on the page does automagically). Finally, when the results are eventually displayed they are (at least for this example) usually either "Overall Rating" or "Assessment" and, we’ll use that status result in our tests for what to return.

We’ll account for the domain and IP address in the function parameters along with the amount of time we should pause between GET+check attempts. It’s also a good idea to provide a way to pass in any extra curl options (e.g. in the event folks are behind a proxy server and need to input that to make the requests work). We’ll define the function with some default parameters:

get_rating <- function(site="rud.is", ip="", pause=5, curl.opts=list()) {

}

This definition says that if we just call get_rating(), it will

    default to using "rud.is" as the domain (you can pick what you want in your implementation)
    not supply an IP address (which the script will then have to lookup with nsl)
    will pause 5s between GET+check attempts
    pass no extra curl options

Getting into the details

For the IP address logic, we’ll have to test if we passed in an an address string and perform a lookup if not:

# try to resolve IP if not specified; if no IP can be found, return
# a "NA" data frame

  if (ip == "") {

    tmp <- nsl(site)
    if (is.null(tmp)) {
      return(data.frame(site=site, ip=NA, Certificate=NA,
                        Protocol.Support=NA, Key.Exchange=NA,
                        Cipher.Strength=NA)) }
    ip <- tmp
  }

(don’t worry about the return(...) part yet, we’ll get there in a bit).

Once we have an IP address, we’ll need to make the call to the ssllabs.com test site and perform the check loop:

# get the contents of the URL (will be the raw HTML text)
# build the URL with sprintf

rating.dat <- getURL(sprintf("https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=%s&s=%s&ignoreMismatch=on", site, ip), .opts=curl.opts)

# while we don't find some indication of a completed request,
# pause and try again

while(!grepl("(Overall Rating|Assessment failed)", rating.dat)) {
  Sys.sleep(pause)
  rating.dat <- getURL(sprintf("https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=%s&s=%s&ignoreMismatch=on", site, ip), .opts=curl.opts)
}

We can then start making some decisions based on the results:

# if the assessment failed, return a data frame of NA's

if (grepl("Assessment failed", rating.dat)) {

  return(data.frame(site=site, ip=NA, Certificate=NA,
                    Protocol.Support=NA, Key.Exchange=NA,
                    Cipher.Strength=NA))
}

# otherwise, parse the resultant HTML

x <- htmlTreeParse(rating.dat, useInternalNodes = TRUE)

Unfortunately, the results are not “consistent”. While there are plenty of uniquely identifiable <div>s, there are enough differences between runs that we have to be a bit generic in our selection of data elements to extract. I’ll leave the view-source: of a result as an exercise to the reader. For this example, we’ll focus on extracting:

        the overall rating (A-F)
        the “Certificate” score
        the “Protocol Support” score
        the “Key Exchange” score
        the “Cipher Strength” score

There are plenty of additional fields to extract, but you should be able to extrapolate and grab what you want to from the rest of the example.

Extracting the results

We’ll need to delve into XPath to extract the <div> values. We’ll use the xpathSApply function to perform this task. Since there sometimes is a <span> tag within the <div> for the rating and since the rating has a class tag to help identify which color it should be, we use a starts-with selection parameter to just get anything beginning with rating_. If it returns an R list structure, we know we have the one with a <span> element, so we re-issue the call with that extra XPath component.

rating <- xpathSApply(x,"//div[starts-with(@class,'rating_')]/text()", xmlValue)

if (class(rating) == "list") {

  rating <- xpathSApply(x,"//div[starts-with(@class,'rating_')]/span/text()", xmlValue)
}

For the four attributes (and values) we’ll be extracting, we can use the getNodeSet call which will give us all of them into a structure we can process with xpathSApply

labs <- getNodeSet(x,"//div[@class='chartBody']/div[@class='chartRow']/div[@class='chartLabel']")

vals <- getNodeSet(x,"//div[@class='chartBody']/div[@class='chartRow']/div[starts-with(@class,'chartValue')]")

# convert them to vectors

labs <- xpathSApply(labs[[1]], "//div[@class='chartLabel']/text()", xmlValue)

vals <- xpathSApply(vals[[1]], "//div[starts-with(@class,'chartValue')]/text()", xmlValue)

At this point, labs will be a vector of label names and vals will be the corresponding values. We’ll put them, the original domain and the IP address into a data frame:

# rbind will turn the vector into row elements, with each

# value being in a column

rating.result <- data.frame(site=site, ip=ip,

                            rating=rating, rbind(vals),
                            row.names=NULL)

# we use the labs vector as the column names (in the right spot)    

colnames(rating.result) <- c("site", "ip", "rating",

                              gsub(" ", "\\.", labs))

and return the result:
return(rating.result)
Finishing up

If we run the whole function on one domain we’ll get a one-row data frame back as a result. If we use ldply from the plyr package to run the get_rating function repeatedly on a vector of domains, it will combine them all into one whole data frame. For example:

sites <- c("rud.is", "stackoverflow.com", "er-ant.com")

ratings <- ldply(sites, get_rating)

ratings

##                site              ip rating Certificate Protocol.Support Key.Exchange Cipher.Strength

## 1            rud.is  184.106.97.102      B         100               70           80              90

## 2 stackoverflow.com 198.252.206.140      A         100               90           80              90

## 3        er-ant.com            <NA>   <NA>        <NA>             <NA>         <NA>            <NA>

There are many tweaks you can make to this function to extract more data and perform additional processing. If you make some of your own changes, you’re encouraged to add to the gist (link above & below) and/or drop a note in the comments.

Hopefully you’ve seen how well-suited R is for this type of operation and have been encouraged to use it in your next attempt at some site/data scraping.

library(RCurl)
library(XML)
library(plyr)

 #' get the Qualys SSL Labs rating for a domain+cert

#'

#' @param site domain to test SSL configuration of

#' @param ip address of \code{site} (will resolve it and take\cr

#' first response if not specified, but that may not always work as you expect)

#' @param hide.results ["on"|"off"] should the results show up in the SSL Labs history (default "on")

#' @param pause timeout between tries (default 5s)

#' @param curl.opts options to pass to \code{getURL} i.e. proxy setting

#' @return data frame of results

#'

  get_rating <- function(site="rud.is", ip="", hide.results="on", pause=5, curl.opts=list()) {

# try to resolve IP if not specified; if no IP can be found, return

# a "NA" data frame

if (ip == "") {

tmp <- nsl(site)

if (is.null(tmp)) { return(data.frame(site=site, ip=NA, Certificate=NA,

Protocol.Support=NA, Key.Exchange=NA, Cipher.Strength=NA)) }

ip <- tmp

}

# need to let it actually process the certificate if not already cached

rating.dat <- getURL(sprintf("https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=%s&s=%s&ignoreMismatch=on&hideResults=%s", site, ip, hide.results), .opts=curl.opts)

while(!grepl("(Overall Rating|Assessment failed)", rating.dat)) {

Sys.sleep(pause)

rating.dat <- getURL(sprintf("https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=%s&s=%s&ignoreMismatch=on&hideResults=%s", site, ip, hide.results), .opts=curl.opts)

}

if (grepl("Assessment failed", rating.dat)) {

return(data.frame(site=site, ip=NA, Certificate=NA,

Protocol.Support=NA, Key.Exchange=NA, Cipher.Strength=NA))

}

x <- htmlTreeParse(rating.dat, useInternalNodes = TRUE)

# sometimes there is a <span ...> tag in the <div>, which will result in an

# empty list() object being returned. we check for that and handle it

# appropriately.

rating <- xmlValue(x[["//div[starts-with(@class,'rating_')]/text()"]])

if (class(rating) == "list") {

rating <- xmlValue(x[["//div[starts-with(@class,'rating_')]/span/text()"]])

}

# extract the XML objects for the ratings labels & values

labs <- getNodeSet(x,"//div[@class='chartBody']/div[@class='chartRow']/div[@class='chartLabel']")

vals <- getNodeSet(x,"//div[@class='chartBody']/div[@class='chartRow']/div[starts-with(@class,'chartValue')]")

# convert them to vectors

labs <- xpathSApply(labs[[1]], "//div[@class='chartLabel']/text()", xmlValue)

vals <- xpathSApply(vals[[1]], "//div[starts-with(@class,'chartValue')]/text()", xmlValue)

# make them into a data frame

rating.result <- data.frame(site=site, ip=ip, rating=rating, rbind(vals), row.names=NULL)

colnames(rating.result) <- c("site", "ip", "rating", gsub(" ", "\\.", labs))

return(rating.result)

}

 sites <- c("rud.is", "stackoverflow.com", "er-ant.com")

ratings <- ldply(sites, get_rating)

ratings

## site ip rating Certificate Protocol.Support Key.Exchange Cipher.Strength

## 1 rud.is 184.106.97.102 B 100 70 80 90

## 2 stackoverflow.com 198.252.206.140 A 100 90 80 90

## 3 er-ant.com <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA> <NA>

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/scraping-ssl-labs-server-test-results-with-r/

Data Mining Outsourcing in a Better and Unique Approach

Data mining outsourcing services are ideal for clarity in various decision making processes.  It is the ultimate goal of any organization and business to increase on its profits as well as strengthen the bond with its customers. Equipping the business in such a way that it’s very easy to detect frauds and manage risks in a convenient manner is equally important. Volumes of data that are irrelevant or cannot be used when raw needs to be converted to a more useful form.  The data mining outsourcing services can greatly help you to analyze and interpret data in a more diligent way.

This service to reliable, experienced and qualified hands is very important. Your research project or engineering project can be easily and conveniently handled by experienced staff who guarantees you an accuracy level of about 98% and a massive reduction in operating costs. The quality of work is unsurpassed and the presentation is done in a format that is easy and simple for you. The project is done in a very short time alleviating you delays as well as ensuring on-time completion of your projects. To enjoy a successful outsourcing experience, you need to bank on a famous and reliable expertise.

The only time to rely with data mining outsourcing services is when you do not have a reliable, experienced expertise in your business.  Statistics indicate that it’s very easy to lose business intelligence or expose the privacy of the customers through this process. However companies which offer secure outsourcing process are on the increase as a result of massive competition. It’s an opportunity to develop your potential of sourced data and improve your business in all fields. 

Data mining potential applications are infinite. However major applications are in the marketing research and scientific projects. It’s done both on large and small quantities of data by experienced staff well known for their best analytical procedures to guarantee you accurate and easy to use information. Data mining outsourcing services are the only perfect way to profitability.

Source:http://www.e-edge.biz/Data_Mining_Outsourcing_in_a_Better_and_Unique_Approach.html

How to scrape data without coding? A step by step tutorial on import.io

Import.io (pronounced import-eye-oh) lets you scrape data from any website into a searchable database. It is perfect for gathering, aggregating and analysing data from websites without the need for coding skills. As Sally Hadadi, from Import.io, told Journalism.co.uk: the idea is to “democratise” data. “We want journalists to get the best information possible to encourage and enhance unique, powerful pieces of work and generally make their research much easier.” Different uses for journalists, supplemented by case studies, can be found here.

A beginner’s guide

After downloading and opening import.io browser, copy the URL of the page you want to scrape into the import.io browser. I decided to scrape the search results website of orphanages in London:

001 Orphanages in London

After opening the website, press the tiny pink button in top right corner of the browser and follow up with “Let’s get cracking!” in the bottom right menu which has just appeared.

Then, choose the type of scraping you want to perform. In my case, it’s a Crawler (we’ll be getting data from multiple similar pages on the same site):

crawler

And confirm the URL of the website you want to scrape by clicking “I’m there”.

As advised, choose “Detect optimal settings” and confirm the following:

data

In the menu “Rows per page” select the format in which data appears on the website, whether it is “single” or “multiple”. I’m opting for the multiple as my URL is a listing of multiple search results:multiple

Now, the time has come to “train your rows” i.e. mark which part of the website you are interested in scraping. Hover over an entire “entry” or “paragraph”:hover over entry

…and he entry will be highlighted in pink or blue. Press “Train rows”.

train rows

Repeat the operation with the next entry/paragraph so that the scraper gets the hang of the pattern of your selections. Two examples should suffice. Scroll down to the bottom of your website to make sure that all entries until the last one are selected (=highlighted in pink or blue alternately).

If it is, press “I’ve got all 50 rows” (the number depends on how many rows you have selected).

Now it’s time to focus on particular chunks of data you would like to extract. My entries consist of a name of the orphanage, address, phone number and a short description so I will extract all those to separate columns. Let’s start by adding a column “name”:

add column

Next, highlight the name of the first orphanage in the list and press “Train”.

highlighttrain

Your table should automatically fill in with names of all orphanages in the list:table name

If it didn’t, try tweaking your selection a bit. Then add another column “address” and extract the address of the orphanage by highlighting the two lines of addresses and “training” the rows.

Repeat the operation for a “phone number” and “description”. Your table should end up looking like this:table final

*Before passing on to the next column it is worth to check that all the rows have filled up. If not, highlighting and training of the individual elements might be necessary.

Once you’ve grabbed all that you need, click “I’ve got what I need”. The menu will now ask you if you want to scrape more pages. In this case, the search yielded two pages of search results so I will add another page. In order to this this, go back to your website in you regular browser, choose page 2 (or any next one) of your search results and copy the URL. Paste it into the import.io browser and confirm by clicking “I’m there”:

i'm there

The scraper should automatically fill in your table for page 2. Click “I’ve got all 45 rows” and “I’ve got what I needed”.

You need to add at least 5 pages, which is a bit frustrating with a smaller data set like this one. The way around it is to add page 2 a couple of times and delete the unnecessary rows in the final table.

Once the cheating is done, click “I’m done training!” and “Upload to import.io”.

upload

Give the name to your Crawler, e.g. “Orphanages in London” and wait for import.io to upload your data. Then, run crawler:run crawler

Make sure that the page depth is 10 and that click “Go”. If you’re scraping a huge dataset with several pages of search results, you can copy your URLs to Excel, highlight them and drag down with a black cross (bottom right of the cell) to obtain a comprehensive list. Paste it into the “Where to start?” window and press “Go”.go

crawlingAfter the crawling is complete, you can download you data in EXCEL, HTML, JSON or CSV.dataset

As a result, we obtain a data set which can be easily turned into a map of orphanages in London, e.g. using Google Fusion Tables.

Source:http://www.interhacktives.com/2014/03/06/scrape-data-without-coding-step-step-tutorial-import-io/

The PromptCloud Advantage- Web Scraping with an Edge

The global market is now more aware of its data scraping needs. And so with the demand, the list of suppliers has grown too. This post is dedicated to bringing out the PromptCloud Advantage among such providers.

PromptCloud-Winning-The Race

1. The know-how- Crawling the web, as mundane as it may sound, is a fairly complex task. No one is to be blamed for overlooking the complexity as these things surface only after you’ve tried it yourself and delved into the nitty-gritty. The design decisions you take sit at the core of what you build and eventually monetize. And the long-term effects of such architectural choices are as pleasing if you’ve done it right as disturbing they might turn out if you’re not far-sighted.

Although the expertise of building the tech stack for such large-scale data acquisition, distributing your clusters (and putting thoughts into their geographical locations), maintaining queues, databases and backups, does come from ‘been there done that’, we have been lucky to have the tech advantage imbibed into us since inception. Not that we got it right the first time, but our systems have evolved with technologies, improving each day. Now that we have been there in this business for the last 56 months, it does feel like a long journey for our stack and yes, we do know better :)

2. SLAs- SLAs are what bolsters the data itself. PromptCloud’s key SLAs are scale and quality; while not compromising the data coverage or the politeness policies on your sources. Since we perform focused crawls, there’s no dilution of data and you can consume it all or ask us to index it in order to search using logical combinations in queries. For your reference, here’s a list of all SLAs to visit while picking your data service provider.

changing_place_changing_time_changing_thouts_changing_future.

3. The Experience- There are many scraping tools and crawling services in the market which might just serve the need. What PromptCloud provides is a data acquisition experience; and we go as many number of extra miles as you’d like us to go for it. By leveraging our DaaS platform, we make sure you get what you need from the time you start your research for a data provider through importing the data feeds into your database. We hear your requirements in detail, make sure we’ve got it right by sharing samples and going multiple iterations of reprocessing the data to match your needs while you battle internally on freezing your requirements. But what’s more magical is the way all these feeds get delivered to you, at the intervals you requested; programatically.

It might be evident for the SLAs and the know-how fusing to provide the experience, but it’s that additional human touch that actually aids in sustaining it. We make sure you’re at peace while our systems handle the roadblocks and sort out the messiness on the web.

Source:https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/the-promptcloud-advantage-web-scraping/

'Scrapers' Dig Deep for Data on Web

At 1 a.m. on May 7, the website PatientsLikeMe.com noticed suspicious activity on its "Mood" discussion board. There, people exchange highly personal stories about their emotional disorders, ranging from bipolar disease to a desire to cut themselves.

It was a break-in. A new member of the site, using sophisticated software, was "scraping," or copying, every single message off PatientsLikeMe's private online forums.

Enlarge Image

Bilal Ahmed wrote about his health on a site that was scraped. Andrew Quilty for The Wall Street Journal.

PatientsLikeMe managed to block and identify the intruder: Nielsen Co., the privately held New York media-research firm. Nielsen monitors online "buzz" for clients, including major drug makers, which buy data gleaned from the Web to get insight from consumers about their products, Nielsen says.

"I felt totally violated," says Bilal Ahmed, a 33-year-old resident of Sydney, Australia, who used PatientsLikeMe to connect with other people suffering from depression. He used a pseudonym on the message boards, but his PatientsLikeMe profile linked to his blog, which contains his real name.

After PatientsLikeMe told users about the break-in, Mr. Ahmed deleted all his posts, plus a list of drugs he uses. "It was very disturbing to know that your information is being sold," he says. Nielsen says it no longer scrapes sites requiring an individual account for access, unless it has permission.

Related Reading

    Digits: Escaping the 'Scrapers'
    Complete Coverage: What They Know

Journal Community

The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of "scraping." Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.

The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.

The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites.

Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.

One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.

It's rarely a coincidence when you see Web ads for products that match your interests. WSJ's Christina Tsuei explains how advertisers use cookies to track your online habits.

The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.

Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.

California has a special protection for public officials, including politicians, sheriffs and district attorneys. It makes it easier for them to remove their home address and phone numbers from these databases, by filling out a special form stating they fear for their safety.

Data brokers long have scoured public records, such as real-estate transactions and courthouse documents, for information on individuals. Now, some are adding online information to people's profiles.

Many scrapers and data brokers argue that if information is available online, it is fair game, no matter how personal.

"Social networks are becoming the new public records," says Jim Adler, chief privacy officer of Intelius Inc., a leading paid people-search website. It offers services that include criminal background checks and "Date Check," which promises details about a prospective date for $14.95.

"This data is out there," Mr. Adler says. "If we don't bring it to the consumer's attention, someone else will."

Scraping for Your Real Name

PeekYou.com has applied for a patent for a way to, among other things, match people's real names to pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and online forums.

Read PeekYou.com's patent application.

Enlarge Image

New York-based PeekYou LLC has applied for a patent for a method that, among other things, matches people's real names to the pseudonyms they use on blogs, Twitter and other social networks. PeekYou's people-search website offers records of about 250 million people, primarily in the U.S. and Canada.

PeekYou says it also is starting to work with listening services to help them learn more about the people whose conversations they are monitoring. It says it hands over only demographic information, not names or addresses.

Employers, too, are trying to figure out how to use such data to screen job candidates. It's tricky: Employers legally can't discriminate based on gender, race and other factors they may glean from social-media profiles.

One company that screens job applicants for employers, InfoCheckUSA LLC in Florida, began offering limited social-networking data—some of it scraped—to employers about a year ago. "It's slowly starting to grow," says Chris Dugger, national account manager. He says he's particularly interested in things like whether people are "talking about how they just ripped off their last employer."

Scrapers operate in a legal gray area. Internationally, anti-scraping laws vary. In the U.S., court rulings have been contradictory. "Scraping is ubiquitous, but questionable," says Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. "Everyone does it, but it's not totally clear that anyone is allowed to do it without permission."

Scrapers and listening companies say what they're doing is no different from what any person does when gathering information online—they just do it on a much larger scale.

"We take an incomprehensible amount of information and make it intelligent," says Chase McMichael, chief executive of InfiniGraph, a Palo Alto, Calif., "listening service" that helps companies understand the likes and dislikes of online customers.

Scraping services range from dirt cheap to custom-built. Some outfits, such as 80Legs.com in Texas, will scrape a million Web pages for $101. One Utah company, screen-scraper.com, offers do-it-yourself scraping software for free. The top listening services can charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to monitor and analyze Web discussions.

Some scrapers-for-hire don't ask clients many questions.

"If we don't think they're going to use it for illegal purposes—they often don't tell us what they're going to use it for—generally, we'll err on the side of doing it," says Todd Wilson, owner of screen-scraper.com, a 10-person firm in Provo, Utah, that operates out of a two-room office. It is one of at least three firms in a scenic area known locally as "Happy Valley" that specialize in scraping.

Enlarge Image

Some of the computer code behind screen-scraper.com's software. Chris Detrick for The Wall Street Journal

Screen-scraper charges between $1,500 and $10,000 for most jobs. The company says it's often hired to conduct "business intelligence," working for companies who want to scrape competitors' websites.

One recent assignment: A major insurance company wanted to scrape the names of agents working for competitors. Why? "We don't know," says Scott Wilson, the owner's brother and vice president of sales. Another job: attempting to scrape Facebook for a multi-level marketing company that wanted email addresses of users who "like" the firm's page—as well as their friends—so they all could be pitched products.

Scraping often is a cat-and-mouse game between websites, which try to protect their data, and the scrapers, who try to outfox their defenses. Scraping itself isn't difficult: Nearly any talented computer programmer can do it. But penetrating a site's defenses can be tough.

One defense familiar to most Internet users involves "captchas," the squiggly letters that many websites require people to type to prove they're human and not a scraping robot. Scrapers sometimes fight back with software that deciphers captchas.

More From the Series

    Web's New Goldmine: Your Secrets

    Personal Details Exposed Via Biggest Websites

    Microsoft Quashed Bid to Boost Web Privacy

    On Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only

    Stalking by Cellphone

    Google Agonizes Over Privacy

    The Tracking Ecosystem

    On the Web, Children Face Intensive Tracking

Some professional scrapers stage blitzkrieg raids, mounting around a dozen simultaneous attacks on a website to grab as much data as quickly as possible without being detected or crashing the site they're targeting.

Raids like these are on the rise. "Customers for whom we were regularly blocking about 1,000 to 2,000 scrapes a month are now seeing three times or in some cases 10 times as much scraping," says Marino Zini, managing director of Sentor Anti Scraping System. The company's Stockholm team blocks scrapers on behalf of website clients.

At Monster.com, the jobs website that stores résumés for tens of millions of individuals, fighting scrapers is a full-time job, "every minute of every day of every week," says Patrick Manzo, global chief privacy officer of Monster Worldwide Inc. Facebook, with its trove of personal data on some 500 million users, says it takes legal and technical steps to deter scraping.

At PatientsLikeMe, there are forums where people discuss experiences with AIDS, supranuclear palsy, depression, organ transplants, post-traumatic stress disorder and self-mutilation. These are supposed to be viewable only by members who have agreed not to scrape, and not by intruders such as Nielsen.

"It was a bad legacy practice that we don't do anymore," says Dave Hudson, who in June took over as chief executive of the Nielsen unit that scraped PatientsLikeMe in May. "It's something that we decided is not acceptable, and we stopped."

Mr. Hudson wouldn't say how often the practice occurred, and wouldn't identify its client.

The Nielsen unit that did the scraping is now part of a joint venture with McKinsey & Co. called NM Incite. It traces its roots to a Cincinnati company called Intelliseek that was founded in 1997. One of its most successful early businesses was scraping message boards to find mentions of brand names for corporate clients.

In 2001, the venture-capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel Inc., was among a group of investors that put $8 million into the business.

Intelliseek struggled to set boundaries in the new business of monitoring individual conversations online, says Sundar Kadayam, Intelliseek's co-founder. The firm decided it wouldn't be ethical to use automated software to log into private message boards to scrape them.

But, he says, Intelliseek occasionally would ask employees to do that kind of scraping if clients requested it. "The human being can just sign in as who they are," he says. "They don't have to be deceitful."

In 2006, Nielsen bought Intelliseek, which had revenue of more than $10 million and had just become profitable, Mr. Kadayam says. He left one year after the acquisition.

At the time, Nielsen, which provides television ratings and other media services, was looking to diversify into digital businesses. Nielsen combined Intelliseek with a New York startup it had bought called BuzzMetrics.

The new unit, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, quickly became a leader in the field of social-media monitoring. It collects data from 130 million blogs, 8,000 message boards, Twitter and social networks. It sells services such as "ThreatTracker," which alerts a company if its brand is being discussed in a negative light. Clients include more than a dozen of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, according to the company's marketing material.

Like many websites, PatientsLikeMe has software that detects unusual activity. On May 7, that software sounded an alarm about the "Mood" forum.

David Williams, the chief marketing officer, quickly determined that the "member" who had triggered the alert actually was an automated program scraping the forum. He shut down the account.

The next morning, the holder of that account e-mailed customer support to ask why the login and password weren't working. By the afternoon, PatientsLikeMe had located three other suspect accounts and shut them down. The site's investigators traced all of the accounts to Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

On May 18, PatientsLikeMe sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nielsen. Ten days later, Nielsen sent a letter agreeing to stop scraping. Nielsen says it was unable to remove the scraped data from its database, but a company spokesman later said Nielsen had found a way to quarantine the PatientsLikeMe data to prevent it from being included in its reports for clients.

PatientsLikeMe's president, Ben Heywood, disclosed the break-in to the site's 70,000 members in a blog post. He also reminded users that PatientsLikeMe also sells its data in an anonymous form, without attaching user's names to it. That sparked a lively debate on the site about the propriety of selling sensitive information. The company says most of the 350 responses to the blog post were supportive. But it says a total of 218 members quit.

In total, PatientsLikeMe estimates that the scraper obtained about 5% of the messages in the site's forums, primarily in "Mood" and "Multiple Sclerosis."

Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703358504575544381288117888

Why People Hesitate To Try Data Mining

What is hindering a number of people from venturing into the promising world of data mining? Despite so much encouragement, promotions, testimonials, and evidences of the benefits of online data collection, still only a handful take the challenge and really gain the pay offs it has to offer.

It may sound unthinkable that such an opportunity for success has been neglected by many. It may also sound absurd why many well-meaning individuals are hindered from enjoying the benefits of the blessings of the 21st century.

The Causes

After considerable observation and analysis of the human psyche, one can understand the underlying reasons behind the hesitance to try the profitable data mining service. The most common reasons why people are afraid to try new technology or why they remain passive and uninvolved are: fear; lack of knowledge; and pride.

Fear. The most paralyzing of human emotions is fear. It can, to some extent, cause a person to be insane, unprofitable, sick, and lost. Although fear is a normal reaction to certain stimuli and a natural feeling experienced by humans, it must always be monitored and controlled.  Usually, people share common fears, such as: fear of change; fear of anything new; and fear of the unknown.

Source:http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/people-hesitate-try-data-mining/