Warding off evil spirits: in the real world, the laws of trespass are clear; but the laws as applied to electronic trespassing are less certain.

Security Management, February, 2004 by Wittliff, Reid

A security manager is informed that an unauthorized user is crawling the company Web site, "scraping" corporate information and using it to make money. Security wants it stopped, but how? The company Web site is open to the world. Anybody with an Internet connection can visit the site with no password required. In fact, corporate executives want members of the public to visit, but security wants human visitors, not automated "spider" programs or "bots" that simply suck out information, place it on someone else's Web site, and use it to lure visitors away from legitimate sites.

THE COMPANY MIGHT deploy technical defenses to try to stop the intruders. For instance, security could simply locate the spider's source IP address and block the spider from entering the...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.