Last Updated on 16 June 2025 at 19:24

As a business or website owner, you should strategize on how to protect your website and business data against content scraping and cybercrime. You should not only focus on site-scraping, but also on manual copying, content theft, and web scraping bots. Before getting to ask for DMCA ‘takedown‘ and ‘stay down‘ judicial injunctions, you should implement a number of security layers we will shortly present hereafter.

Those barriers will not stop the cybercrime or illegal actions against your website data and content, but using this checklist you can significantly reduce the negative impact of criminal behaviour.

The cost of illegal actors is very high for small business owners. The total cost of the below security solutions implementation is as high as the cost of website creation and is in the range of

General considerations for WordPress websites

A lot of businesses are using WordPress CMS to present their services on the Internet. Sometimes, this CMS is also used as an online Agenda and even an eCommerce. WordPress is a

Context and objectives for data website protection

This case study will review what kind of security attacks a website owner can encounter. It is a common misunderstanding thinking that hackers

1. System hacking and protection solutions

Once a website is going ‘public‘ and known to search engines like Google and Bing, the website is attacked every day, 24 hours by 24 hours. This is a fact ! The bigger your website, the more attacks you will get. These attacks, even non-successful, will

So, against which attacks should you defend yourself ?

1.1. Non-authorized access

Problem: hackers try to get access to your website administration console, your database, your file server.

Possible solutions:

To resume, the goal of these above security 12 checks is to keep the bad boys outside, and preventing them from breaking in.

Time estimation for the solution implementation: a minimum of 2 weeks of work. Cost estimation: a minimum of 7’000.- CHF as per the list above.

1.2. Bots not obeying to your rules

Problem: you might have set up some rules where you forbid some bots to index images, crawl some folders. Google, Bing, and other major search engines are respecting the rules that a website owner has put in place. The bad bots, however, do not follow these rules. There is indeed no obligation to follow your rules and directions. Still, many official search engines and bots respect these.

Possible solutions:

2. Information hacking and protection solutions

Once we got rid of all those technical hackers trying to

What can be done to protect your creations, property, information ?

Possible solutions:

3. The case of bot or human content scrapers and protection solutions

A specific note must be made for copycats and scrapers.

Their goal is only to steal your multimedia assets such as your images, content, menus and keywords to use them on their own website. The notion of ‘fair use‘ exists. Fair use is a doctrine in the law that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to acquire first permission from the copyright holder. However, there are specific conditions for ‘fair use‘ such as proper attribution and very limited usage. Everything that exceeds this ‘fair use‘, should be monitored, and actions should be taken. In the end, someone stole something from you without asking for your permission. A lot of those human content scrapers will try to present their illegal activities as a ‘free advertisement‘ for yourself. Rest assured, this is just a blatant lie served since the beginning of the Internet public networks.

These content scrapers visitors are quite hard to detect and block, as they belong to your regular visitors’ category. Luckily, some solutions exist against these scrapers:

• Rate-limit for bots or humans visitors performing too many clicks on your web pages. A typical, human visitor will
   

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The long-term viability of WordPress’ solutions for data and cybercrime protection

All websites, and not only those created with WordPress are continuously under attack, either by bots or humans. Some attacks aim to obtain your passwords, while others want to steal your images or unique content. A lot of hacking strategies exist. A lot of defensive tools also exist to defend one against those attacks. Zero risk doesn’t exist, but if one is aware of what kind of attacks can happen, and for what purpose, a defensive strategy can be elaborated.

Many free and paid tools exist today to help any website owner defending against the bad boys and thieves.

Cybercrime is everywhere, so be prepared when your website is their next target.

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• Contributeur

Elena Debbaut

Partenaire – Restructuration Opérationnelle

https://elena.debbaut.solutions/

ed@consultingteam.solutions

Elena Debbaut is a strategic execution expert to boards and executive teams. She leads and advises on complex transformations when governance barriers, internal politics, or structural fragmentation prevent organizations from executing critical decisions.

Specialities:

• governance-constrained transformation
• operational restructuring
• strategic recovery & execution