Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The AI boom is creating a new content economy – one where savvy content owners are striking multi-million-dollar licensing deals, while others are being automatically scraped by bots to train AI models for free. It’s impossible not to have noticed the biggest names in AI, including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity and more, at the center of an argument about ethical content scraping.

The perfect conditions for both pre-planned and opportunistic scalper attacks are quite simple: limited availability and high demand. The trading card culture – think everything from Pokémon and Magic the Gathering to Panini or Topps football and baseball cards – fuels this fire, with first print editions and special editions held to a higher value than reprints.

At Netacea we talk about protecting our customers from sophisticated attacks carried out by bots. But what does this actually mean? How do you know you’ve got a problem with sophisticated bot attacks? We go into a detailed explanation below but it’s worth remembering that there is a human adversary behind all automated attacks. Although somewhat autonomous once programmed, bots do not attack a target without human intervention.