Unraveling Cloudflare’s Protection

From our experience at TrawlingWeb, we’ve seen the evolution and emergence of new web unlockers in the market. Initially, we favored using full browsers with Playwright, but over time, super APIs became a more appealing choice. Even though Playwright is free, a full browser requires more resources and time compared to a Scrapy program with an integrated unlocker. After crunching the numbers, we realized that the costs associated with data extraction were comparable, if not more advantageous, when using the latest and most cost-effective unlockers, which also turned out to be more reliable.

However, in the dynamic world of data extraction, solutions are fleeting. In a blink of an eye, sites protected by Cloudflare and Datatome became inaccessible through these unlockers. This led us to the pressing need to seek innovative alternatives and solutions.

Why is it essential to bypass Cloudflare’s bot protection?

According to our data, Cloudflare dominates with a staggering 84% of the market in anti-bot solutions.

Therefore, if you’re involved in data extraction, especially in medium to large-scale projects, it’s highly likely that you’ve encountered a site protected by Cloudflare.

But the reality is, if you try to use Scrapy on a site protected by Cloudflare, your extraction tool will quickly run into a 429 error, halting any further progress.

How does Cloudflare’s bot protection work? Our perspective at Trawlingweb.com

Cloudflare doesn’t publicly share all the code behind its technology, and the reason is clear: if they did, it would be straightforward to decipher the bot detection criteria, and in turn, develop extraction tools capable of bypassing it, rendering the software ineffective.

There are individuals who attempt to unravel the API calls behind these challenges to understand their workings. At Trawlingweb.com, we believe this approach demands significant effort and is temporary, as any software update could negate all previous work.

Our understanding of its operation is based on our accumulated experience, trials, errors, and the study of the fundamental principles of bot detection. It’s worth noting that the implementation of these principles may vary depending on the anti-bot solution provider.

Occasionally, our assumptions might not be accurate. As we’ll discuss later, until a solution is tested in practice, its effectiveness cannot be fully guaranteed.

Moreover, it’s crucial to understand that each website can set its own rules. This means a solution that works for one site might not be effective for another.

Turnstile

At Trawlingweb.com, we’ve already dedicated a full article to Cloudflare’s Turnstile for those interested in delving deeper into the subject.

In essence, Turnstile is a Javascript-based challenge activated if Cloudflare deems your request not trustworthy enough to directly access the website. If this happens, a Captcha will appear in your browser, which, in most cases, will resolve automatically. However, sometimes, it might ask you to check a box if the system still has doubts about the authenticity of your connection.

How does Cloudflare determine if a request should face the Turnstile challenge or if it’s legitimate?

Digital identification of site visitors at Trawlingweb.com

How does Cloudflare determine if a request should face the Turnstile challenge or if it’s legitimate?

From our experience at Trawlingweb.com, we’ve observed that the decision is based on a combination of rules and criteria that might vary depending on the website. However, the main techniques are consistent with what we’ve previously discussed:

IP reputation and type: based on your IP address, there are several services that evaluate its reputation by checking lists of blocked addresses. If an IP appears on these lists, it could be a red flag, as that address might have been previously used for DDoS attacks or spam. Additionally, it checks if the IP belongs to data center address ranges, like AWS, which could indicate automated access to the site and not from a residential location.

Digital identification: this refers to the process where, based on your hardware and software environment, the anti-bot solution creates a “digital fingerprint”, compares it to a database of legitimate fingerprints, and assigns a reliability level to your session. This applies at various levels, from the TLS layer to the browser configuration, providing a detailed image of the running environment.

Javascript challenges: tied to digital identification techniques, certain Javascript codes might be executed in your browser, and based on the outcomes, the anti-bot software might identify your browser’s configuration. These scripts require a visual mode browser to run, and the inability to do so might indicate the presence of automated software.

Given the combination of these factors, at Trawlingweb.com, we initially chose to use Playwright with a real browser from a data center. However, after certain updates, some sites required the use of residential proxies, which turned out to be less cost-effective compared to the most affordable web unlockers in the market. Hence, we decided to shift our strategy.

However, a few days ago, several of these unlockers became incompatible with Cloudflare. In our quest for solutions, we stumbled upon the Scrapy Impersonate package and decided to give it a shot.

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