Got a warning for my blog going over 100GB in bandwidth this month… which sounded incredibly unusual. My blog is text and a couple images and I haven’t posted anything to it in ages… like how would that even be possible?
Turns out it’s possible when you have crawlers going apeshit on your server. Am I even reading this right? 12,181 with 181 zeros at the end for ‘Unknown robot’? This is actually bonkers.
Edit: As Thunraz points out below, there’s a footnote that reads “Numbers after + are successful hits on ‘robots.txt’ files” and not scientific notation.
Edit 2: After doing more digging, the culprit is a post where I shared a few wallpapers for download. The bots have been downloading these wallpapers over and over, using 100GB of bandwidth usage in the first 12 days of November. That’s when my account was suspended for exceeding bandwidth (it’s an artificial limit I put on there awhile back and forgot about…) that’s also why the ‘last visit’ for all the bots is November 12th.
- Get a blocklist
- Enable rate limits
- Get a proper robots.txt
ProfitSilence
What is that log analysis tool you are using in the picture? Looks pretty neat.
It’s a mix, I put two screenshots together. On the left is my monthly bandwidth usage from CPanel on the right is Awstats (though I hid some sections so the Robots/Spiders section was closer to the top).
This is why I use CloudFlare. They block the worst and cache for me to reduce the load of the rest. It’s not 100% but it does help.
Looks for me like actions of AI agents.
Fucking hell.
Yeah and that’s why people are using cloudflare so much.
One corporation DDOS’s your server to death so that you need the other corporations’ protection.
basically protection racket
That’s a nice website you gots there, would be ashame if something weres to happen to it.
A friend (works in IT, but asks me about server related things) of a friend (not in tech at all) has an incredibility low traffic niche forum. It was running really slow (on shared hosting) due to bots. The forum software counts unique visitors per 15 mins and it was about 15k/15 mins for over a week. I told him to add Cloudflare. It dropped to about 6k/15 mins. We excitemented turning Cloudflare off/on and it was pretty consistent. So then I put Anubis on a server I have and they pointed the domain to my server. Traffic drops to less than 10/15 mins. I’ve been experimenting with toggling on/off Anubis/Cloudflare for a couple months now with this forum. I have no idea how the bots haven’t scrapped all of the content by now.
TLDR: in my single isolated test, Cloudflare blocks 60% of crawlers. Anubis blocks presumably all of them.
Also if anyone active on Lemmy runs a low traffic personal site and doesn’t know how or can’t run Anubis (eg shared hosting), I have plenty of excess resources I can run Anubis for you off one of my servers (in a data center) at no charge (probably should have some language about it not being perpetual, I have the right to terminate without cause for any reason and without notice, no SLA, etc). Be aware that it does mean HTTPS is terminated at my Anubis instance, so I could log/monitor your traffic if I wanted as well, so that’s a risk you should be aware of.
It’s interesting that anubis has worked so well for you in practice.
What do you think of this guy’s take?
AI scrapers are the new internet DDoS.
Might want to throw something Infront of your blog to ward them off like Anubis or a Tarpit.
the one with the quadrillion hits is this bad boy: https://www.babbar.tech/crawler
Babbar.tech is operating a crawler service named Barkrowler which fuels and update our graph representation of the world wide web. This database and all the metrics we compute with are used to provide a set of online marketing and referencing tools for the SEO community.
we?
It’s a quote from the website
It is common custom to indicate quotes, with either “quotes” or for a longer quote a
block quote
The latter can be done by prefixing the line with a
here on lemmy (uses the common markdown syntax).Doing either of this help avoid ambiguity.
Thanks the taking the time. I always find it hard to follow up and point out the ambiguity / alternative without coming across in some unwelcome way
I run an ecommerce site and lately they’ve latched onto one very specific product with attempts to hammer its page and any of those branching from it for no readily identifiable reason, at the rate of several hundred times every second. I found out pretty quickly, because suddenly our view stats for that page in particular rocketed into the millions.
I had to insert a little script to IP ban these fuckers, which kicks in if I see a malformed user agent string or if you try to hit this page specifically more than 100 times. Through this I discovered that the requests are coming from hundreds of thousands of individual random IP addresses, many of which are located in Singapore, Brazil, and India, and mostly resolve down into those owned by local ISPs and cell phone carriers.
Of course they ignore your robots.txt as well. This smells like some kind of botnet thing to me.
I see the same thing but hitting my lemmy instance. Not much you can do other than start up banning or geoip banning.
I don’t really get those bots.
Like, there are bots that are trying to scrape product info, or prices, or scan for quantity fields. But why the hell do some of these bots behave the way they do?
Do you use Shopify by chance? With Shopify the bots could be scraping the product.json endpoint unless it’s disabled in your theme. Shopify just seems to show the updated at timestamp from the db in their headers+product data, so inventory quantity changes actually result in a timestamp change that can be used to estimate your sales.
There are companies that do that and sell sales numbers to competitors.
No idea why they have inventory info on their products table, it’s probably a performance optimization.
I haven’t really done much scraping work in a while, not since before these new stupid scrapers started proliferating.
Have you ever tried writing a scrapper. I have for offline reference material. You’ll do that a few times and know. I usually only want a relatively small site (say a Khan Academy lesson which doesn’t save text offline, just videos) and put in a large delay between requests but I’ll still come back after thinking I have it down and it’s thrashed something
Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.
Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.
Can you just move that product to a new URL? What happens?
It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.
What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.
This is far beyond my limited coding experience but I do enjoy a good puzzle. In your opinion do you think it could be some gen AI scraper. Like the gen AI is deciding what page to scrape and cuz its stupid it keeps selecting your page?
Alternatively I wonder if the product page just happens to have an unsual combinination of keywords that the bot is looking for. Maybe its looking for cheap prices of RAM and the page has some keywords related to RAM?
Good luck I hope you are able to get them to start hammering that page.
In my case the pattern appears to be some manner of DDoS botnet, probably not an AI scraper. The request origins are way too widespread and none of them resolve down to anything that’s obviously datacenters or any sort of commercial enterprise. It seems to be a horde of devices in consumer IP ranges that have probably be compromised by some malware package or another, and whoever is controlling it directed it at our site for some reason. It’s possible that some bad actor is using a similar malware/bot farm arrangement to scrape for AI training, but I’d doubt it. It doesn’t fit the pattern from that sort of thing from what I’ve seen.
Anyway, my script’s been playing automated whack-a-mole with their addresses and steadily filtering them all out, and I geoblocked the countries where the largest numbers of offenders were. (“This is a bad practice!” I hear the hue and cry from specific strains of bearded louts on the Internet. That says maybe, but I don’t ship to Brazil or Singapore or India, so I don’t particularly care. If someone insists on connecting through a VPN from one of those regions for some reason, that’s their own lookout.)
They seem to have more or less run out of compromised devices to throw at our server, so now I only see one such request every few minutes rather than hundreds per second. I shudder to think how long my firewall’s block list is by now.
Could it be a competitor for that particular product? Hired some foreign entity to hit anything related to their own product?
Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.
Have you googled the SKU and see if anything else happens to share the number?
I have and there’s nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.
Yeah, that’s the kind of weird shit I don’t understand. Someone on the other hand is paying for servers and a residential proxy to send that traffic too. Why?
I just geo-restrict my server to my country, certain services I’ll run an ip-blacklist and only whitelist the known few networks.
Works okay I suppose, kills the need for a WAF, haven’t had any issues with it.
It’s 12181 hits and the number behind the plus sign are robots.txt hits. See the footnote at the bottom of your screenshot.
Phew, so I’m a dumbass and not reading it right. I wonder how they’ve managed to use 3MB per visit?
The robots are a problem, but luckily we’re not into the hepamegaquintogilarillions… Yet.
12,000 visits, with 181 of those to the robots.txt file makes way, way more sense. The ‘Not viewed traffic’ adds up to 136,957 too - so I should have figured it out sooner.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how large the number was and how many visits that would actually entail to reach that number in 25 days. Turns out that would be roughly 5.64 quinquinquagintillion visits per nanosecond. Call it a hunch, but I suspect my server might not handle that.
The traffic is really suspicious. Have you by any chance a health or heartbeat endpoint which provides continuous output? That would explain why so many hits cause so much traffic.
It’s super weird for sure. I’m not sure how the bots have managed to use so much more bandwidth with only 30k more hits than regular traffic, I guess they probably don’t rely on any caching and fetch each page from scratch?
Still going through my stats, but it doesn’t look like I’ve gotten much traffic via any API endpoint (running WordPress). I had a few wallpapers available for download and it looks like for whatever reason the bots have latched onto those.
Check out Anubis. If you have a reverse proxy it is very easy to add, and for the bots stopped spamming after I added it to mine
It’s interesting that anubis has worked so well for you in practice.
What do you think of this guy’s take?
This dance to get access is just a minor annoyance for me, but I question how it proves I’m not a bot. These steps can be trivially and cheaply automated.
I don’t think the author understands the point of Anubis. The point isn’t to block bots completely from your site, bots can still get in. The point is to put up a problem at the door to the site. This problem, as the author states, is relatively trivial for the average device to solve, it’s meant to be solved by a phone or any consumer device.
The actual protection mechanism is scale, the scale of this solving solution is costly. Bot farms aren’t one single host or machine, they’re thousands, tens of thousands of VMs running in clusters constantly trying to scrape sites. So to them, a calculating something that trivial is simple once, very very costly at scale. Say calculating the hash once takes about 5 seconds. Easy for a phone. Let’s say that’s 1000 scrapes of your site, that’s now 5000 seconds to scrape, roughly an hour and a half. Now we’re talking about real dollars and cents lost. Scraping does have a cost, and having worked at a company that does professionally scrape content they know this. Most companies will back off after trying to load a page that takes too long, or is too intensive - and that is why we see the dropoff in bot attacks. It’s that it’s not worth it for them to scrape the site anymore.
So for Anubis they’re “judging your value” by saying “Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is to access this site?” For consumer it’s a fraction of a fraction of a penny in electricity spent for that one page load, barely noticeable. For large bot farms it’s real dollars wasted on my little lemmy instance/blog, and thankfully they’ve stopped caring.
I also recommend it.
Unknown Robot is your biggest fan.
does your blog have a blackhole in it somewhere you forgot about 😄
You have to grow spikes and make it painful for bots to crawl your site. It sucks, and it costs a lot of extra bandwidth for a few months, but eventually they all blacklist your site and leave you alone.
