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

252 points lgats | 1 comments | 17 Oct 25 05:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | 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. rkagerer ◴[18 Oct 25 05:56 UTC] No.45625267[source]▶
I had a similar problem back in 2018, though at a smaller scale.

I wrote a quick-and-dirty program that reads the authoritative list of all AWS IP ranges from https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json (more about that URL at the blog post https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ip-ranges-json/), and creates rules in Windows Firewall to simply block all of them. Granted, it was a sledgehammer, but it worked well enough.

Here's the README.md I wrote for the program, though I never got around to releasing the the code: https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=22eadf6c608448a98b6643606d1...

It ran for some years as a scheduled task on a small handful of servers, but I'm not sure if it's still in use today or even works anymore. If there's enough interest I might consider publishing the code (or sharing it with someone who wants to pick up the mantle). Alternatively it wouldn't be hard for someone to recreate that effort.

G'luck!