Scalpers are reportedly deploying web scrapers to make a quick buck while we’re deep in the memory and storage chip crisis. According to DataDome, a firm that protects websites and other online assets from automated attacks run through bots and AI, it has detected an operation trolling for the latest pricing data on memory modules and their components, sending queries every 6.5 seconds — that’s over 550 requests for each page, resulting in more than 50,000 requests per hour in total. The company says that it has blocked over 10 million requests that have been sent by the scalping bot, even using advanced techniques like cache-busting and ensuring that the request frequency stays under the alarm thresholds that companies use to protect their websites.
What’s interesting is that the bot isn’t just looking at consumer products. Instead, it was also looking at various levels of the supply chain, including DIMM sockets and CAMM2 connectors, as well as industrial memory modules designed for B2B transactions.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen scalpers take advantage of a supply situation in the electronics and computer industry. In fact, this has been a problem with every item that’s been limited or is experiencing a shortage in recent history, like the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro 30th Anniversary pre-orders, RTX 5090 GPUs a few days after its launch, the limited edition MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, and even scalpers taking advantage of selling DDR5 kits for 7x their original value on eBay. But what’s insidious about this operation is that it seems to be a deliberate attack orchestrated by an organized entity with access to sophisticated bots.
DataDome said that the bots used a day-and-night pattern to mimic human activity and also deployed cache-busting parameters — that is, the addition of unique parameters to every request to ensure that they get the latest information and not the one stored in cache. Despite that, there were several telltale signs that these were automated bots. For example, they exclusively targeted RAM listings, and they didn’t interact with other site features like search or shopping cart. The traffic also did not vary to consider breaks, reduced traffic during weekends, and the peak in activity during early evening. When the bot encountered a technical issue, the traffic dropped considerably for several minutes before returning to 100% capacity — something that just does not happen with organic human traffic.
This incident shows how bad the AI infrastructure build-out is hitting the memory and storage industries. Data centers are already expected to consume nearly 70% of the world’s memory supply this year, resulting in limited stocks for every other segment. If this continues in the next several years, analysts say that this will spell the end of entry-level PCs by 2028. We hope that the memory chip manufacturers like Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix increase their manufacturing capacity to stabilize prices once more, but this is easier said than done, with new fabs and production lines taking several months, if not years, to build from scratch.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
