Watchdog says opaque scrapers threaten public-interest journalism

STOCKHOLM – Swedish digital rights and media watchdog Qurium Media Foundation warned that opaque web-scraping systems are posing a growing threat to public-interest journalism, after documenting what it described as a large-scale automated extraction operation targeting an Arab investigative journalism platform.

In a report published on May 29, Qurium said the English-language website of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), a Jordan-based nonprofit newsroom, was hit by a massive scraping event on May 14 that generated traffic from about 1.35 million unique IP addresses across more than 7,300 autonomous systems and 223 country codes.

Qurium said it estimates that at least 25% of the traffic and processing costs incurred by organizations it hosts are linked to scrapers and other automated access systems, creating financial and operational burdens for independent media organizations.

“We estimate that today not less than 25% of the traffic and processing costs of the organizations we host are related to handling scrapers and other automated access systems,” the organization said in the report.

Qurium described opaque scrapers as systems that generate large volumes of traffic while providing “no stable infrastructure,” no identifiable point of contact and no practical mechanism allowing websites to opt out.

The watchdog said its analysis suggested the traffic pattern was consistent with infrastructure associated with NetNut, a commercial proxy service that markets residential proxy networks for web data collection and large-scale scraping operations. However, Qurium stopped short of making a definitive attribution.

“We shared our results with several researchers that are mapping residential proxies, and their feedback was that the behavioral evidence and their internal classifiers points toward a system tagged as NetNut,” the report said.

ARIJ Director General Rawan Damen said the organization was still investigating the motives behind the incident.

“Although Qurium’s investigation provides insights on how the scraping was carried out and indicates who might be behind it, a definitive attribution and understanding of the underlying motives behind the Israeli company NetNut’s targeted attack remain a primary focus of our inquiry,” Damen said.

Qurium said it contacted NetNut’s representatives on May 15 and May 21 seeking comment but had received no response at the time the report was published.

The organization argued that public-interest media outlets face a structural disadvantage because scrapers can extract content at industrial scale while masking activity behind millions of ordinary-looking residential or internet service provider addresses.

“For organizations like ARIJ, the problem is not merely unwanted traffic. It is a structural imbalance,” the report said.

Qurium is a Sweden-based nonprofit specializing in digital security, internet freedom and forensic investigations involving media organizations, human rights groups and civil society actors operating in restrictive environments.

Among the organizations supported by Qurium is Sudans Post, an independent digital-only newspaper covering Sudan and South Sudan. Qurium has hosted and provided mirror infrastructure for the outlet since 2020 after South Sudanese authorities blocked access to the website following reporting that triggered threats from the National Security Service, according to both Qurium and Sudans Post.

At the time, Qurium said Sudans Post joined a group of South Sudanese news websites that were being supported through its Bifrost mirroring system designed to bypass internet censorship.

Qurium said the scraping incident highlighted broader concerns over accountability, transparency and the growing costs imposed on independent media organizations already operating under financial and political pressure.

“The central issue is transparency,” the report said, arguing that legitimate crawlers generally identify themselves and allow websites to regulate access, while opaque scraping systems do not.