docs: Add guide secure-scraping#1908
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vdusek
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May 27, 2026
| Because the target decides what your crawler receives, a malicious or compromised site can try to: | ||
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| - **Steer your crawler to URLs you never intended to visit** - other hosts, or internal services that are not reachable from the public internet. | ||
| - **Reach non-HTTP destinations** through schemes like `file://`, `gopher://`, `ftp://`, or `dict://`, to read local files or talk to services such as Redis. |
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it seems weird to me to specify just Redis and nothing else without any further context 🙂
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| - **Steer your crawler to URLs you never intended to visit** - other hosts, or internal services that are not reachable from the public internet. | ||
| - **Reach non-HTTP destinations** through schemes like `file://`, `gopher://`, `ftp://`, or `dict://`, to read local files or talk to services such as Redis. | ||
| - **Exhaust your resources** with a crawler trap, an oversized response, or a decompression bomb. |
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we should either explain the individual "traps" or provide external links
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| :::info | ||
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| Crawlee for Python had this SSRF gap in its sitemap and `robots.txt` handling before version 1.7.0, fixed in [#1862](https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python/pull/1862) and [#1864](https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python/pull/1864). See the advisory [GHSA-3r75-xc34-5f44](https://github.com/apify/crawlee-python/security/advisories/GHSA-3r75-xc34-5f44). |
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Not sure we wanna mention this - @B4nan, could you tell us your opinion please?
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| When following links from a page, <ApiLink to="class/EnqueueLinksFunction">`enqueue_links`</ApiLink> keeps only those on the same hostname by default and filters out links to any other host. Crawlee also re-checks the host a request finally lands on, so a redirect that ends on a different host is rejected. The client still walks the whole chain to get there, though, so an intermediate hop to an internal address is fetched along the way. Note that `same-hostname` does **not** include subdomains - `example.com` will not match `api.example.com`. | ||
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| ```python |
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I know it is a small code example, but for maintainability, could you please implement it as a dedicated Python script, as we do for others? (applies to all examples)
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| Isolation also changes the calculus for the application-level controls: inside a dedicated, egress-restricted environment the blast radius of an SSRF is contained, so widening the scope with `strategy='all'` or accepting arbitrary URLs is far less risky than it would be on a shared host. | ||
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| ## Running on the Apify platform |
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maybe this could be a subsection of isolation? 🙂
| @@ -0,0 +1,123 @@ | |||
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| id: secure-scraping | |||
| title: Secure scraping | |||
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maybe "Security of web scraping" would be better?
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