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Ask HN: How to stop an AWS bot sending 2B requests/month?

252 points lgats | 4 comments | 17 Oct 25 05:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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?

1. kachapopopow ◴[17 Oct 25 17:28 UTC] No.45619380[source]▶
redirect it to the client ip, not abuse since you're just an innocent redirect to client-ip service and the (most probable) timeout should consider the service dead after a couple of days or even better they just overload their own servers if there is a page on the client ip or even better is that it causes automatic abuse trigger to kick in and shut down the service.
replies(1): >>45621157 #
2. lgats ◴[17 Oct 25 19:43 UTC] No.45621157[source]▶
I've tried sending a redirect to http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1 to no avail
replies(1): >>45622798 #
3. eek2121 ◴[17 Oct 25 22:18 UTC] No.45622798[source]▶
That isn't the address you should be using. Use whatever public addresses they are hitting you from.
replies(1): >>45623666 #
4. redleader55 ◴[18 Oct 25 00:21 UTC] No.45623666{3}[source]▶
And random ports. If you only hit 80/443, they might be closed