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?
gzip bomb is good if the bot happens to be vulnerable, but even just slowing down their connection rate is often sufficient - waiting just 10 seconds before responding with your 404 is going to consume ~7,000 ports on their box, which should be enough to crash most linux processes (nginx + mod-http-echo is a really easy way to set this up)
The submission and the context is when current blocking doesn't work...
That is strictly less resource intensive than serving 200 and some challenge.