Scraping and data theft is scaling up

Hackers scraping - stealing more than credit cards

2008-02-04 - SC Magazine has an article about scraping and data theft.

The article goes through the basic concepts, some of the problems related to stopping scrapers and some of the risks in not properly handling scraping. Hackers now also target valuable information from subscription-based sites and steal valuable information.

In the end the author tries to push for an web application firewall from the vendor he works for but that seems to be more or less unrelated to blocking scraping.
Web application firewalls is some times useful to protect insecure web servers by intercepting bad request and blocking common attacks such as SQL-injections or access to known vulnerabilities in outdated applications. Though application firewalls may be an exellent device to block a client they usually only provide the most basic functionality for detecting scraping, nothing in the article indicates that this device would be different.