Web Scraping | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign dubbed GemStuffer that has targeted the RubyGems repository with more than 150 gems that use the registry as a data exfiltration channel rather than for malware distribution. "The packages do not appear designed for mass developer compromise," Socket said . "Many have little or no download activity, and the payloads are repetitive, noisy, and unusually self-contained." "Instead, the scripts fetch pages from U.K. local government democratic services portals, package the collected responses into valid .gem archives, and publish those gems back to RubyGems using hardcoded API keys." The development comes as RubyGems temporarily disabled new account registration following what has been described as a major malicious attack. While it's not clear if the two sets of activities are related, the application security company said GemStuffer fits the "same abuse pattern," which invo...

Did you ever try extracting any information from any website? Well, if you have then you have surely enacted web scraping functions without even knowing it! To put in simpler terms, Web scraping, or also known as web data extraction, is the process of recouping or sweeping data from web-pages. It is a much faster and easier process of retrieving data without undergoing the time-consuming hassle of manual data extraction methods. Web scraping uses advanced automatic tools to reclaim data from millions and billions of websites. The Basics of Web Scraping First, some common terms you'll need to know: The Crawler: The web crawler or popularly known as a 'spider,' is an automated website scraping tool that skims through the internet for information. The spider usually surfs the internet and follows links, and explores various web pages to gather or "scrape" up any information. The Scraper: A scraper or web scraper is a comprehensive website scraper ...