Cheryl Andrea Fernando

Cheryl has a strong interest in the evolving role of AI and its impact on digital security. She is currently pursuing her master's degree in cybersecurity at Radboud University, focusing on how emerging technologies shape the security, privacy and resilience of online environments.

While working at SURF, the Dutch NREN, Cheryl explored the challenges in AI bot mitigation. She researched various approaches that help content owners safeguard their material from large-scale automated scraping and sophisticated bots across different infrastructure setups.

Lightning Talk at TNC26

Armed with a toothpick against AI scrapers

Observing random spikes in website traffic at odd hours? If you go to investigate what’s causing it, it’s just an endless amount of requests from a battalion of AI scrapers visiting your website for content to train their machine learning models on. This talk analyses the future scope of tackling these AI scrapers.

Cheryl's participation in the Future Talent Programme 2026 was supported by SURF.