>> and an additional $608,069 for a two-year Cloudflare contract
> Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.
On the paid plans, I think Cloudflare charges for bandwidth. Also, you still need to pay for bandwidth from the origin to Cloudflare. And if it's scraping, it's likely to be a lot of cache misses that need to go to the origin.
> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack?
I've run sites that attract scraping... Aggressive scapers can effectively DoS a server; and if they're trying to get around rate limits, that can look like a DDoS.
> Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.
On the paid plans, I think Cloudflare charges for bandwidth. Also, you still need to pay for bandwidth from the origin to Cloudflare. And if it's scraping, it's likely to be a lot of cache misses that need to go to the origin.
> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack?
I've run sites that attract scraping... Aggressive scapers can effectively DoS a server; and if they're trying to get around rate limits, that can look like a DDoS.