DRAM bots reportedly being deployed to hoover up memory chips and components — one operation ran 10 million web scraping requests, hitting DDR5 RAM product pages every 6.5 seconds

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Image credit: Future

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.

DataDome said that the bots used a day‑and‑night pattern to mimic human activity and also deployed cache‑busting parameters — the addition of unique parameters to every request to ensure that they get the latest information rather than a cached version. Despite that, there were several telltale signs that these were automated bots:

• They exclusively targeted RAM listings and did not interact with other site features such as search or the shopping cart.
• Traffic patterns did not reflect typical human behavior: there were no breaks, reduced activity on weekends, or the usual dip in the early evening.
• When the bot encountered a technical issue, traffic dropped sharply for several minutes before returning to full capacity, a pattern not seen with organic human traffic.

These findings highlight how sophisticated scalping operations are leveraging automated tools to harvest pricing data across the memory‑chip supply chain, potentially exacerbating shortages and price volatility.