Anubis Implements WebAssembly After Year-Long Development to Combat Web Scraping

Anubis, a web protection platform, has integrated WebAssembly after a year of development to enhance its defenses against aggressive web scraping by AI companies. The service employs a Proof-of-Work mechanism inspired by Hashcash, originally designed to reduce email spam. This approach imposes a computational challenge that is negligible for individual users but becomes costly for mass scraping operations. The goal is to reduce server downtime caused by excessive scraping, which can make websites unavailable to genuine visitors. While this Proof-of-Work system currently serves as a temporary solution, Anubis plans to improve its detection capabilities by fingerprinting headless browsers, such as analyzing font rendering techniques. This will help minimize the need for presenting challenge pages to legitimate users. Users are advised to disable certain JavaScript-blocking plugins like JShelter on sites protected by Anubis, as the platform relies on modern JavaScript features for its functionality.