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252 points lgats | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.224s | source

I have been struggling with a bot– 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; crawler)' coming from AWS Singapore – and sending an absurd number of requests to a domain of mine, averaging over 700 requests/second for several months now. Thankfully, CloudFlare is able to handle the traffic with a simple WAF rule and 444 response to reduce the outbound traffic.

I've submitted several complaints to AWS to get this traffic to stop, their typical followup is: We have engaged with our customer, and based on this engagement have determined that the reported activity does not require further action from AWS at this time.

I've tried various 4XX responses to see if the bot will back off, I've tried 30X redirects (which it follows) to no avail.

The traffic is hitting numbers that require me to re-negotiate my contract with CloudFlare and is otherwise a nuisance when reviewing analytics/logs.

I've considered redirecting the entirety of the traffic to aws abuse report page, but at this scall, it's essentially a small DDoS network and sending it anywhere could be considered abuse in itself.

Are there others that have similar experience?

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bigfatkitten ◴[] No.45613614[source]
Do you receive, or expect to receive any legitimate traffic from AWS Singapore? If not, why not blackhole the whole thing?
replies(3): >>45613762 #>>45614181 #>>45614472 #
1. firecall ◴[] No.45614181[source]
Yep, I did this for a while.

The TikTok Byte Dance / Byte Spider bots were making millions of image requests from my site.

Over and over again and they would not stop.

I eventually got Cloudinary to block all the relevant user agents, and initially just totally blocked Singapore.

It’s very abusive on the part of these bot running AI scraping companies!

If I hadn’t been using the kind and generous Cloudinary, I could have been stuck with some seriously expensive hosting bills!

Nowadays I just block all AI bots with Cloudflare and be done with it!