• Cyber Risk Commentary Cybersecurity In-Depth: Getting answers to questions about IT security threats and best practices from trusted cybersecurity professionals and industry experts. • A CISO’s Playbook for Defending Data Assets Against AI Scraping Discover a strategic approach to govern scraping risks, balance security with business growth, and safeguard intellectual capital from automated data harvesting. • February 18, 2026 QUESTION: How can CISOs defend against AI scraping? • Areejit Banerjee, Senior Manager of Data Protection Strategy & Product Trust; Researcher in AI Governance, Purdue University:Organizations with commercially valuable data face a near-certainty that AI-driven scrapers are already trying to harvest it at scale, turning public endpoints into high-throughput extraction pipelines. • Many security teams still treat scraping as a nuisance bot problem to be handled by a vendor, a few Web application firewall (WAF) rules, and wishful thinking. • That framing breaks down as soon as the scraped data underpins revenue or competitive advantage.
Article Summaries:
- Cybersecurity experts warn that AI‑driven data scraping is no longer a minor nuisance but a board‑level threat to intellectual capital and revenue. A new playbook for CISOs recommends treating scraping as a strategic asset protection issue rather than a simple bot problem. Key steps include setting a clear mission statement that ties data protection to business goals, quantifying risks such as revenue loss, IP dilution, and infrastructure theft, and establishing measurable success metrics beyond “zero bots.” The approach calls for enterprise‑wide governance, risk mapping, and repeatable controls to detect, prioritize, and defend against automated data harvesting while balancing growth objectives.
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