Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

Web scraping bots are increasing the pressure on the tech supply chain by scouring sites for DRAM, so their minders can snap up increasingly scarce inventory and resell it for a quick profit.

DataDome, an online security biz, reports that its Galileo threat team spotted a large-scale data gathering operation that has submitted more than 10 million web scraping requests in an effort to find sellers carrying desirable DRAM stock.

The bots have been hitting select sites every 6.5 seconds to query inventories of DRAM and raw hardware components like DIMM sockets. And the people behind the crawlers appear to be using AI tools to enhance the effectiveness of their scraping runs.

"Fraudsters will combine various tooling and commodities to perform fraud at scale, but it's not always obvious what they are using, or for which purpose," said Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome, in an ...