Data scraping is the automated collection of information from web pages, portals, or other content surfaces at scale. Instead of a human copying a few records, a script or bot repeatedly requests pages, parses the returned HTML or API responses, and stores the results for later use. The same technique can support legitimate tasks such as indexing, monitoring, or migration, but it is also widely used for bulk data theft.
In cyber security, scraping matters because it can turn a small exposure into a large leak. If guest pages, search results, widgets, or poorly restricted APIs return information to anonymous users, attackers may automate requests to harvest names, cases, emails, or other records much faster than a person could. Defenses focus on least privilege, tight public-access rules, field-level restrictions, API controls, rate limiting, bot detection, and reviewing exactly what unauthenticated users can see and export.