Protect Your School’s Website Content

I published this post for the first time 5 years ago. A vaccine for COVID-19 had been developed and deployed, which started to bring about our post-pandemic reality.

It was a relatively peaceful time as well, after getting past the events of January 6, 2021. We were looking forward to the 2022 Olympics – a way to bring the world together again.

And right after they were over, Russia invaded Ukraine. It wasn’t enough that COVID killed millions of people in the world.

Technologically, the topic of the the day was what was happening to Websites. They were being “scraped” to make fake Websites. While web scraping’s purpose was a noble one (such as for extracting data from a Web site for archival or referral purposes), it quickly became twisted into a way where people can be scammed.

For instance, between November of 2019 and July of 2020, a software developer illegally scraped over 1.1 billion user records from Alibaba’s Taobao e-commerce platform over an eight-month period. The attacker used a custom web crawler to continuously harvest sensitive information, including user IDs and mobile phone numbers, until Alibaba noticed the data loss and contacted law enforcement.

Just a short time later, at the end of 2022, a company called OpenAI emerged, with their product, ChatGPT. OpenAI had its start in 2015 when it began as a non-profit, with major funding from a couple of names that may be familiar to you – Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

And, if you’ve paid any attention to the news in 2025, data is not just “scraped;” it’s mined. Just like coal, scraping can pull bits and pieces off the walls of a mine; mining takes as much of what’s in the mine and puts it to use or sells it.

Therefore, it’s important to make your school’s Web site content as secure as possible.

While your schools Web site host may have particular tools intended for this purpose, Web sites made with WordPress have a plugin that will eliminate the “right click” function of the computer mouse or keyboard. On a PC, Web content can be highlighted, then “right clicked” to allow a menu to pop up with a list of commands, like “copy,” and then allow the copied content to be pasted somewhere else, like in an email, a social media posting, or another document.

If you want to see this plugin in action, try highlighting any text on this page in an attempt to copy it.

A right click on most Web sites will also produce an option to “View Page Source,” which allows the user to see the html code of the Web site. By stopping the “right click” function, the ability to copy data is disabled for the typical user, but it may still be able to be accessed by bots or web crawlers.

Since not using such a tool can put your site’s content at risk, be sure to check with your Web site’s provider to see how this access can be prevented. This would be a great project to look into now that summer’s here, and prior to the time where things ramp up and get going for the 26-27 school year!