this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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What if a bot/crawler Puppeteers a Chromium browser instead of sending a direct HTTP requisition and, somehow, it managed to set
navigator.webdriver = falseso that the browser will seem not to be automated? It'd be tricky to identify this as a bot/crawler.Oh there are definitely ways to circumvent many bot protections if you really want to work at it. Like a lot of web protection tools/systems, it’s largely about frustrating the attacker to the point that they give up and move on.
Having said that, I know Akamai can detect at least some instances where browsers are controlled as you suggested. My employer (which is an Akamai customer and why I know a bit about all this) uses tools from a company called Saucelabs for some automated testing. My understanding is that our QA teams can create tests that launch Chrome (or other browsers) and script their behavior to log into our website, navigate around, test different functionality, etc. I know that Akamai can recognize this traffic as potentially malicious because we have to configure the Akamai WAF to explicitly allow this traffic to our sites. I believe Akamai classifies this traffic as a “headless” Chrome impersonator bot.