Kasada, a top-tier cybersecurity company, protects websites against various online threats. Unfortunately, its advanced technologies block not only malicious bots but also restrict the access of scrapers.
In this tutorial, you'll learn how this firewall works and the five of the most effective ways to bypass Kasada.
But first, let's see more about the obstacles in your way.
What Is Kasada
Kasada offers a robust Web Application Firewall (WAF) that protects against online attacks. This cloud-based solution uses advanced techniques, like behavioral analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting, to detect and prevent attacks in real time.
Kasada is designed to be easy to deploy and manage and integrates seamlessly with other security tools and services.
Now that you know what you're up against, let's see how you can get around it.
How to Bypass Kasada
Bypassing Kasada is no easy feat, but you can use specific methods to your advantage. Below, you'll find five techniques to fortify your scraper and get the needed data.
However, keep in mind that you can easily avoid all the hassle with a single solution: a web scraping API like ZenRows. But in the meantime, let's see what else is on the table!
1. IP Reputation
IP reputation is a measure Kasada uses to understand how trustworthy an IP address is based on its behavior history. It's a way to identify IPs associated with malicious activities. Thus, a way to avoid detection is to use proxies to mask your IP when making automated requests.
However, not all proxies are equal. Free solutions are often unreliable and easily get blocked by anti-bot measures. Premium proxies, on the other hand, offer residential IPs that will help you avoid Kasada's suspicion.
Check out our guide on web scraping proxies to learn more and see some of the best options.
2. CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's one of the most common, but also most effective, techniques used in bot detection. The challenges it poses are effortless for humans but do make bots struggle, thus allowing the detection system to prevent automated systems from accessing and interacting with a website.
Moreover, these tests are becoming increasingly difficult, so you're faced with either using a CAPTCHA-solving service or preventing them from appearing in the first place. The former is prone to fail and will end up quite expensive. But on the bright side, you can use CAPTCHA proxies to avoid triggering the challenges and save yourself a lot of resources.
You can learn more about CAPTCHA proxies in our guide and discover the best solutions to help you with your Kasada bypass purpose.
3. Header Request Analysis
Header request analysis is another technique Kasada uses to detect bots. It looks at the HTTP headers sent with each request to a website, which contain essential information about the request. Namely, the User Agent, referrer, or not having cookies in all requests, provide clues about the nature and origin of the request.
Most importantly, the UA may easily give away your scraper, so you need to make sure it looks real and its values are updated. Also, it's best to rotate User Agents with every request to scale your scraping project successfully.
Take a look at our guide on the best User Agents for web scraping to learn more and grab a list.
4. Behavioral Analysis with Machine Learning
This powerful technique used in bot detection involves analyzing user behavior patterns, like mouse movements or keystrokes, over time to build a model of typical human behavior. Anything that deviates from the expected suggests bot activity and triggers blocking mechanisms.
However, a headless browser, like Puppeteer, can render JavaScript and emulate scrolling like a human would. That and other human-like interactions with the site will help you fly under the radar to bypass Kasada.
Furthermore, for protection against advanced anti-bot solutions is best if you use the Puppeteer Stealth plugin to mask the automation markers headless browsers have. And if you prefer using Python, Pyppeteer is a viable solution to consider.
5. Device Fingerprinting
This is a technique Kasada uses to identify and track individual devices accessing a website. It collects and analyzes information about the device's hardware, software, and configuration, like its operating system, browser version, screen resolution, and installed plugins.
All of that creates a unique fingerprint Kasada uses to identify and block requests from devices associated with bot activity. Check out our guide on browser fingerprinting to learn how to win over this anti-bot measure and extract all the data you need.
Conclusion
As you can see, bypassing Kasada requires a lot of preparation. Thankfully, if you follow the methods outlined above, you'll be more likely to scrape any web page.
What's even better is that you can save yourself all that time and resources and use ZenRows to do all that with a single API call. Its advanced anti-bot bypass feature, rotating proxies, geo-targeting, headless browsing, and other ones can help you scale your scraping project in no time.
Give it a go with the 1,000 free API credits you get upon registration.
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