Can a website detect when you are using Selenium with chromedriver?

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I"ve been testing out Selenium with Chromedriver and I noticed that some pages can detect that you"re using Selenium even though there"s no automation at all. Even when I"m just browsing manually just using Chrome through Selenium and Xephyr I often get a page saying that suspicious activity was detected. I"ve checked my user agent, and my browser fingerprint, and they are all exactly identical to the normal Chrome browser.

When I browse to these sites in normal Chrome everything works fine, but the moment I use Selenium I"m detected.

In theory, chromedriver and Chrome should look literally exactly the same to any webserver, but somehow they can detect it.

If you want some testcode try out this:

from pyvirtualdisplay import Display
from selenium import webdriver

display = Display(visible=1, size=(1600, 902))
display.start()
chrome_options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-extensions")
chrome_options.add_argument("--profile-directory=Default")
chrome_options.add_argument("--incognito")
chrome_options.add_argument("--disable-plugins-discovery");
chrome_options.add_argument("--start-maximized")
driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=chrome_options)
driver.delete_all_cookies()
driver.set_window_size(800,800)
driver.set_window_position(0,0)
print "arguments done"
driver.get("http://stubhub.com")

If you browse around stubhub you"ll get redirected and "blocked" within one or two requests. I"ve been investigating this and I can"t figure out how they can tell that a user is using Selenium.

How do they do it?

I installed the Selenium IDE plugin in Firefox and I got banned when I went to stubhub.com in the normal Firefox browser with only the additional plugin.

When I use Fiddler to view the HTTP requests being sent back and forth I"ve noticed that the "fake browser"s" requests often have "no-cache" in the response header.

Results like this Is there a way to detect that I'm in a Selenium Webdriver page from JavaScript suggest that there should be no way to detect when you are using a webdriver. But this evidence suggests otherwise.

The site uploads a fingerprint to their servers, but I checked and the fingerprint of Selenium is identical to the fingerprint when using Chrome.

This is one of the fingerprint payloads that they send to their servers: {"appName":"Netscape","platform":"Linuxx86_64","cookies":1,"syslang":"en-US","userlang":"en-US","cpu":"","productSub":"20030107","setTimeout":1,"setInterval":1,"plugins":{"0":"ChromePDFViewer","1":"ShockwaveFlash","2":"WidevineContentDecryptionModule","3":"NativeClient","4":"ChromePDFViewer"},"mimeTypes":{"0":"application/pdf","1":"ShockwaveFlashapplication/x-shockwave-flash","2":"FutureSplashPlayerapplication/futuresplash","3":"WidevineContentDecryptionModuleapplication/x-ppapi-widevine-cdm","4":"NativeClientExecutableapplication/x-nacl","5":"PortableNativeClientExecutableapplication/x-pnacl","6":"PortableDocumentFormatapplication/x-google-chrome-pdf"},"screen":{"width":1600,"height":900,"colorDepth":24},"fonts":{"0":"monospace","1":"DejaVuSerif","2":"Georgia","3":"DejaVuSans","4":"TrebuchetMS","5":"Verdana","6":"AndaleMono","7":"DejaVuSansMono","8":"LiberationMono","9":"NimbusMonoL","10":"CourierNew","11":"Courier"}}

It"s identical in Selenium and in Chrome.

VPNs work for a single use, but they get detected after I load the first page. Clearly some JavaScript is being run to detect Selenium.

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Can a website detect when you are using Selenium with chromedriver? __del__: Questions

import time
time.sleep(5)   # Delays for 5 seconds. You can also use a float value.

import time
while True:
    print("This prints once a minute.")
    time.sleep(60) # Delay for 1 minute (60 seconds).

from time import sleep
sleep(0.1) # Time in seconds

Can a website detect when you are using Selenium with chromedriver? __del__: Questions

import os
os.remove("/tmp/<file_name>.txt")

import os
os.unlink("/tmp/<file_name>.txt")

file_to_rem = pathlib.Path("/tmp/<file_name>.txt")
file_to_rem.unlink()

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
myfile="/tmp/foo.txt"

## If file exists, delete it ##
if os.path.isfile(myfile):
    os.remove(myfile)
else:    ## Show an error ##
    print("Error: %s file not found" % myfile)

#!/usr/bin/python
import os

## Get input ##
myfile= raw_input("Enter file name to delete: ")

## Try to delete the file ##
try:
    os.remove(myfile)
except OSError as e:  ## if failed, report it back to the user ##
    print ("Error: %s - %s." % (e.filename, e.strerror))

Enter file name to delete : demo.txt
Error: demo.txt - No such file or directory.

Enter file name to delete : rrr.txt
Error: rrr.txt - Operation not permitted.

Enter file name to delete : foo.txt

shutil.rmtree()

#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys
import shutil

# Get directory name
mydir= raw_input("Enter directory name: ")

## Try to remove tree; if failed show an error using try...except on screen
try:
    shutil.rmtree(mydir)
except OSError as e:
    print ("Error: %s - %s." % (e.filename, e.strerror))

a = [1, 2, 3, 4]
b = a.index(6)

del a[b]
print(a)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:zjm_codea.py", line 6, in <module>
    b = a.index(6)
ValueError: list.index(x): x not in list

a = [1, 2, 3, 4]

try:
    b = a.index(6)
    del a[b]
except:
    pass

print(a)

>>> a = ["a", "b", "c", "d"]
>>> a.remove("b")
>>> print(a)
["a", "c", "d"]

>>> a = [10, 20, 30, 40, 20, 30, 40, 20, 70, 20]
>>> a = [x for x in a if x != 20]
>>> print(a)
[10, 30, 40, 30, 40, 70]

We hope this article has helped you to resolve the problem. Apart from Can a website detect when you are using Selenium with chromedriver?, check other __del__-related topics.

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