Abstract:  Web crawlers are widely used in the contemporary Internet society as a means of acquiring data. However, the value enriched by the data induces web crawlers to gradually alienate. Malicious crawlers contain triple risks of computer information system damage, computer information system intrusion and computer information system data leakage, and criminal regulation is necessary to them. In order to avoid the generalization of criminal crackdown, situational distinctions should be made based on the operation process of web crawlers, and the legal nature of web crawlers is analyzed according to the risk characteristics in different contexts, so as to construct the conviction path of malicious crawlers and delineate the scope of criminal regulation. When the data crawling behavior violates the authorized judgment-type technical measures, and the crawled data has infringed on the legal interests of data security and reached a considerable degree of harm, it has become malicious behavior and should be criminally regulated.

Key words: web crawler, technical risk, anti-crawling measures, crawler protocols, criminal regulation