When you scrape data from large-scale websites, it is least likely that you didn’t have to face a CAPTCHA to prove that you’re a human. As a web scraper, you may already know why cybersecurity professionals were forced to invent them. They were a result of your bots automating endless website requests to access them. So even genuine users had to go through the pains of confronting CAPTCHAs which appear in different forms. However, you can bypass CAPTCHAs whether you’re a web scraper or not, which would be this article’s objective. But first, let’s dive into what CAPTCHAs are.
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. That’s a pretty long acronym, isn’t it? Now you may be wondering what the last part of this acronym, Turing Test means – well, it is a simple test to determine whether a human or bot is interacting with a web page or web server.
After all, a CAPTCHA differentiates humans from bots, helping Cyber security analysts safeguard web servers from brute force attacks, DDoS, and in some situations, web scraping.
Let’s find out how CAPTCHAs differentiate humans from bots.
You can find the CAPTCHAs in the forms of a website, including contact, registration, comments, sign-up, or check-out forms.
Traditional CAPTCHAs include an image with stretched or blurred letters, numbers, or both in a box with a background color or transparent background. Then you have to identify the characters and type them in the text field that follows. This process of identifying characters is easier for humans but somewhat complicated for a bot.
On the other hand, some advanced bots can intercept distorted letters with the assistance of machine learning over the years. As a result, some companies such as Google replaced conventional CAPTCHAs with sophisticated CAPTCHAs. One such example is ReCAPTCHA which you will discover in the next section.
ReCAPTCHA is a free service that Google offers. It asks the users to tick boxes rather than typing text, solving puzzles, or math equations.
A typical ReCAPTCHA is more advanced than conventional forms of CAPTCHAs. It uses real-world images and texts such as traffic lights in streets, texts from old newspapers, and printed books. As a result, the users don’t have to rely on old-school CAPTCHAs with blurry and distorted text.
There are three significant types of ReCAPTCHA tests to verify whether you’re a human being or not:
These are the ReCAPTCHAs that request the users to tick a checkbox, “I’m not a robot” like in the above image. Although it may seem to the naked eye that even a bot could complete this test, several factors are taken into account:
If the ReCAPTCHA fails to verify that you’re a human, it will present you with another challenge.
These ReCAPTCHAs provide users with nine or sixteen square images as you can see in the above image. Each square represents a part of a larger image or different images. A user must select squares representing specific objects, animals, trees, vehicles, or traffic lights.
If the user’s selection matches the selections of other users who have performed the same test, the user is verified. Otherwise, the ReCAPTCHA will present a more challenging test.
Did you know that ReCAPTCHA can verify whether you’re a human or not without using checkboxes or any user interactions?
It certainly does by considering the user’s history of interacting with websites and the user’s general behavior while online. In most scenarios, upon these factors, the system would be able to determine if you’re a bot.
Failure to do so would revert to any of the two previously mentioned methods.
CAPTCHAs can be triggered if a website detects unusual activities resembling bot behavior; Such unusual behavior includes unlimited requests within split seconds and clicking on links at a far higher rate than humans.
Then some websites would automatically have CAPTCHAs in place to shield their systems.
As far as the ReCAPTCHAs are concerned, it is not exactly clear what triggers them. However, general causes are mouse movements, browsing history, and tracking of cookies.
Now you have a clear overview of what CAPTCHAs and Rechaptchas are, how they operate, and what triggers them. Now it’s time to look into how CAPTCHAs affect web scraping.
CAPTCHAs can hinder scraping the web as the automated bots carry out most of the scraping operations. However, do not get disheartened. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are ways to overcome CAPTCHAs when scraping the web. Before we get to them, let’s dive our attention to what you need to be aware of before you scrape.
When you connect to a website, you send information about your device to the connecting website. They may use this information to customize content to the specifications of your device and metric tracking. So when they find out that the requests are from the same device, any request you send afterward will get blocked.
Another fact you should be aware of is that the target website has not blacklisted your IP address. They’re likely to blacklist your IP address when you send too many requests with your scraper/crawler.
Rotating the HTTP headers and proxies (more on this in the next section) with a pool will ensure that multiple devices access the website from different locations. So you should be able to continue scraping without interruption from CAPTCHAs. Having said you must ensure you’re not harming the performance of the website by any means.
In addition to the above key factors, you need to know the CAPTCHAs below when web scraping with a bot:
Merely changing the user agent will not be sufficient as you will need to have a list of user-agent strings and then rotate them. This rotation will result in the target website seeing you as a different device when in reality, one device is sending all the requests.
As a best practice for this step, it would be great to keep a database of real user agents. Also, delete the cookies when you no longer need them.
A more straightforward low technical method to solve a CAPTCHA would be to use a CAPTCHA-solving service. They use Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (MI), and a culmination of other technologies to solve a CAPTCHA.
When you let your scraper directly access a URL every split second, then the receiving website would be suspicious. As a result, the target website would trigger a CAPTCHA.
To avoid such a scenario, you could set the referer header to make it appear to be referred from another page. It would reduce the likelihood of getting detected as a bot. Alternatively, you could make the bot visit other pages before visiting the desired link.
Honeypots are hidden elements on a webpage that security experts use to trap bots or intruders. Although the browser renders its HTML, its CSS properties are set to hide. However, unlike humans, the honey pot code would be visible to the bots when they scrape the data. As a result, they fell into the trap set by the honeypot.
So you have to make sure that you check the CSS properties of all the elements in a web page are not hidden or invisible before you commence scraping. Only when you’re certain that none of the elements are hidden, do you set your bot for scraping.
Bypassing CAPTCHAs is simply the process of removing the blockers that arises while scraping data from numerous sites. As CAPTCHAs are designed to verify if the web traffic is organic.
ReCaptcha prevents your websites from spams and malicious bot traffic. It generates interactive puzzles to differentiate organic traffic from bot traffic.
When you send web requests back to back from a bot or any scraping solution, the CAPTCHAs might easily identify the traffic is from a spammy bot. So, using a proxy addresses from a proxy will let you appear more like a real-time traffic.
This article would have given you have a comprehensive idea of how to avoid CAPTCHAs while scraping the web. Avoiding a CAPTCHA can be a complicated process. However, with the use of specific techniques discussed in this article, you can develop the bot in such a way as to avoid CAPTCHAs.
We hope you “ll make use of all the techniques discussed in this article.
