THE LAB #7: Scraping PerimeterX protected websites
What is PerimeterX?
PerimeterX is one of the most well-known anti-bot solutions, used by some of the top-tier websites on the net. They recently merged with Human Security, another company in the anti-bot industry but more focused on fraud prevention and account abuse.
How to detect PerimeterX anti-bot solution?
If we analyze the tech stack of the target website with Wappalyzer, PerimeterX appears in the security section with a good degree of precision. Detecting it by inspecting the network tab in the developer tools is pretty easy. When active, you will see that PerimeterX sets a cookie with the following format when loading the first page of the website.
The Human Challenge
The Human Challenge is the PerimeterX “trademark” when talking about anti-bot challenges. Instead of throwing a Captcha or a Re-Captcha, their anti-bot solution shows this big button that a human must keep “pressed” with the mouse until the challenge is solved.
