Anubis anti-scraping software

Anubis is a specialized open-source software program designed to protect websites from aggressive web scraping and automated crawlers. Created by the technologist Xe Iaso, it was initially developed to mitigate server overloads caused by web crawlers that ignored traditional exclusion protocols like robots.txt. The software functions by introducing a proof-of-work (PoW) challenge that a visitor's browser must solve before accessing the site, effectively making large-scale automated scraping computationally expensive and less viable.

Since its inception, Anubis has gained significant traction within the free and open-source software (FOSS) community. It is currently utilized by high-profile organizations and projects including the Linux Kernel mailing list, the GNOME Project, FFmpeg, and Wine. Because it is an open-source project hosted on platforms like GitHub and maintained by community contributors, it does not have a traditional corporate manufacturing location or a single commercial owner; rather, it remains part of the global digital infrastructure available under the MIT License.