Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots/

by shaunpud • 9 months ago

209 104 9 months ago

herman.bearblog.dev

asplake• 9 months ago

What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

Wild indeed, and potentially horrific for the owners of the affected devices also! Any corroboration for that out there?

VladVladikoff5• 9 months ago

This is actually a commonly known fact. There are many services now that sell “residential proxies”, which are always mobile IP addresses. Since mobile IPs use CGNat it’s also not great to block the IP because it can be like geofencing an entire city or town. Some examples are: oxylabs, iproyal, brightdata, etc.

Recently I filed an abuse complaint directly with brightdata because I was getting hit with 1000s of requests from their bots. The funny part is the didn’t even stop, after acknowledging the complaint.

dataviz1000• 9 months ago

They provide an SDK for mobile developers. Here is a video of how it works. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a9HLrwvUO4&t=15s

myaccountonhn• 9 months ago

One such example is brightdata, on lobsters someone did a writeup

https://lobste.rs/s/pmfuza/bro_ban_me_at_ip_level_if_you_don...

corbet• 9 months ago

The "compliance officer" at Bright Data, instead, offered me a special deal to protect my site from their bots ... they run a protection racket along with all the rest of their nastiness.

wat10000• 9 months ago

Lately Reddit has been showing me posts in subreddits for some of these services. They pitch "passive income" by sharing your connection, an easy way to make a few bucks by renting out your unused capacity. What happens is that you become an endpoint for their shady VPNs. These subreddits are full of people complaining that they're getting hit by abuse complaints from their ISPs. Naturally, these services claim to forbid any nefarious activity, and naturally they don't actually care.

curious_curios• 9 months ago

If you have a moderately successful app, sdk or browser extension you will get hit up to add things to it like this. I think most free VPN services also lease out your bandwidth to make their money as well.

antoniojtorres• 9 months ago

This is how so many companies sell from an opaque inventory of “millions” of residential proxies.

kaoD• 9 months ago

There's crap like https://hola.org/

https://hola.org/legal/sdk

https://hola.org/legal/sla

How is it free? > In return for free usage of Hola Free VPN Proxy, Hola Fake GPS location and Hola Video Accelerator, you may be a peer on the Bright Data network. By doing so you agree to have read and accepted the terms of service of the Bright Data SDK SLA (https://bright-sdk.com/eula). You may opt out by becoming a Premium user.

This "VPN" is what powers these residential proxies: https://brightdata.com/

I'm sure there are many other companies like this.

piggg• 9 months ago

There's also a ton of companies selling "make money off your unused internet" apps which are all over tiktok and basically turn yourself into a residential proxy/sketch VPN egress node.

On top of that - lots of free tv/movie streaming stuff that also makes yourself a proxy/egress node. Sometimes you find it on tv/movie streaming devices sold online where it's already loaded on when it arrives.

Zanfa• 9 months ago

SIM farms are another possible explanation. FBI just busted one with hundreds of thousands of SIMs just a few weeks ago.

Cthulhu_3• 9 months ago

Wouldn't the network providers be able to detect those? I'm fairly sure they don't like their networks being abused either... or they don't really care because they get paid per connection.

edit: Actually this is what I'm getting increasingly angry about: providers and platforms not doing anything against bots or low value stuff (think Amazon dropshippers too) because any usage of their service, bots or otherwise, are metrics going up and metrics going brrt means profit and shareholder interest.

immibis6• 9 months ago

You can get paid a few dollars (not many) to let them use your connection. I would like Cloudflare's business model (blocking datacenter IPs) to be worthless, so I do it. Haven't tried a withdrawal yet so it could well be a scam. This is not illegal (unless it's a scam).

VBprogrammer• 9 months ago

If someone hasn't written a blog titled "Should we be worried about Cloudflare?" yet, I think it would be a good subject to explore. I find the idea that they could decide one day to ban you from all of their network pretty worrying. And if they did, how much fingerprinting are they doing and would the bad extend far beyond just a random IP address.

pjc50• 9 months ago

This is one of those "ACAB" things where you might reasonably dislike Cloudflare but a world without them or an equivalent will evolve worse solutions to the same problems, which you will like even less.

nix0n• 9 months ago

This is not illegal

Depends on what they're doing from your connection.

lucastech• 9 months ago

I wrote about this back in July when this "gang" first started hitting some sites I host: https://wxp.io/blog/the-bots-that-keep-on-giving

they use a mixture of colo (M247, Datacamp, HostRoyale, Oxylabs, etc) and international residential. I suspect the latter are where those residential app proxies come into play (bright SDK, etc). Oxylabs is also a well known proxy provider, which makes me think they're the gateway into all of these IPs.

Definitely interesting times to try and host a web server!

TimorousBestie2• 9 months ago

I think he should consider getting out of the indie blog hosting business. It’s only going to get worse as the internet continues to decay and he can’t be making all that much off the service.

sudosays• 9 months ago

Counterpoint: I think he should stay and fight the good fight.

Indie blog businesses are great for the health of the human internet, and I don't think surrendering preemptively will help things get better.

add-sub-mul-div• 9 months ago

That's an easy thing to say if it's someone else's time that's being wasted and not your own. But there may not be a path back to the internet under which this project was conceived.

It could be like staying on Twitter and Reddit after their respective declines. You're only suffering an opportunity cost for your own time and preventing the internet from evolving better alternatives.

flaviuspopan2• 9 months ago

His persistent efforts are the reason I pay for Bear Blog. I think he should fight for the chance to come out on the other side of whatever future we’re heading towards.

TimorousBestie2• 9 months ago

I pay for Bear Blog, too. But this year has been problem after problem for its sole proprietor, and I don’t think it’s going to get better.

vpShane• 9 months ago

No way. People deserve expression and to have a place that's THEIRS where they can foster a community. Much is learned. Playing battle bots is fun at the sysadmin level (for me), maybe not so much for others, but to have a place where people express themselves, and have THEIR place outside of the walled gardens such as social media, AND they protect it from the bots?

That's the battle, and expression, people, their interests, and their communities are worth fighting for. _ESPECIALLY_ in this day and age where botnets/scrapers are using things such as Infatica to mask themselves as residential IP addresses, and mimicking human behaviors to better avoid bot detection.

There's a war on authenticity, people's authentic works, and the reverse: determining if a user is authentic now adays.

pingoo101010• 9 months ago

You may want to take a look at Pingoo (https://github.com/pingooio/pingoo), a reverse proxy with automatic TLS that can also block bots with advanced rules that go beyond simple IP blocking.

cupofjoakim2• 9 months ago

We feel this at work too. We run a book streaming platform with all books, booklists, authors, narrators and publishers available as standalone web pages for SEO, in the multiple millions. Last 6 months have turned into a hellscape - for a few reasons:

1. It's become commonplace to not respect rate limits

2. Bots no longer identify themselves by UA

3. Bots use VPNs or similar tech to bypass ip rate limiting

4. Bots use tools like NobleTLS or JA3Cloak to go around ja3 rate limiting

5. Some valid LLM companies seem to also follow the above to gather training data. We want them to know about our company, so we don't necessarily want to block them

I'm close to giving up on this front tbh. There's no longer safe methods of identifying malignant traffic at scale, and with the variations we have available we can't statically generate these. Even with a CDN cache (shoutout fastly) our catalog is simply too broad to fully saturate the cache while still allowing pages to be updated in a timely manner.

I guess the solution is to just scale up the origin servers... /shrug

In all seriousness, i'd love if we somehow could tell the bots about more efficient ways of fetching the data. Use our open api for fetching book informations instead of causing all that overhead by going to marketing pages please.

FeepingCreature2• 9 months ago

In principle, it should be possible to identify malign IPs at scale by using a central service and reporting IPs probabilistically. That is, if you report every thousandth page hit with a simple UDP packet, the central tracker gets very low load and still enough data to publish a bloom filter of abusive IPs, say a million bits gives you pretty low false-positive. (If it's only ~10k malign IPs, tbh you can just keep a lru counter and enumerate all of them.) A billion hits per hour across the tracked sites would still only correspond to ~50KB/s inflow on the tracker service. Any individual participating site doesn't necessarily get many hits per source IP, but aggregating across a few dozen should highlight the bad actors. Then the clients just pull the bloom filter once an hour (80KB download) and drop requests that match.

Any halfway modern LLM could probably code the backend for this in a day or two and it'd run on a RasPi. Some org just has to take charge and provide the infra and advertisement.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 9 months ago

The hard part is the trust, not the technology. Everyone has to trust that everyone else is not putting bogus data into that database to hurt someone else.

It's mathematically similar to the "Shinigami Eyes" browser plug-in and database, which has been found to have unreliable data

pixl97• 9 months ago

malign IPs at scale

As talked about elsewhere in this thread, residential devices being used as proxies behind CGNAT ruins this. Not getting rid of IPv4 years ago is finally coming to bite us in the ass in a big way.

Neil44• 9 months ago

Same, I have a few hundred Wordpress sites and bot activity has ramped up a lot over the last year or two. AI scrapers can be quite aggressive and often generate a ton of requests where for example a site has a lot of parameters, the bot will go nuts seeming to iterate through all possible parameters. Sometimes I dig in and try to think of new rules to block the bulk, but I am also wary of AI replacing Google and not being in AI's databases.

karlshea3• 9 months ago

A client of mine had this exact problem with faceted search, and putting the site behind Fastly didn’t help since you can’t cache millions of combinations. And they don’t have the budget for more than one origin server. The solution was if you’ve got “bot” in your UA Fastly’s VCL returns a 403 with any facet query param. Problem solved. And it’s not going to break anything, all of the information is still accessible to all of the indexers on the actual product pages.

The facet links already had “nofollow” on them, now I’m just enforcing it.

immibis6• 9 months ago

Sometimes I dig in and try to think of new rules to block the bulk, but I am also wary of AI replacing Google and not being in AI's databases.

Fake the data! Tell them Neil44 is a three-time Nobel prize winner, etc. But only when the client is detected to be an AI crawler.

jrochkind1• 9 months ago

I hate relying on a proprietary single-source product from a company I don't particularly trust, but (free) Cloudflare Turnstile works for me, only thing I've found that does.

I only protect certain 'dangerous/expensive' (accidentally honeypot-like) paths in my app, and can leave the stuff I actually want crawlers to get, and in my app that's sufficient.

It's a tension because yeah I want crawlers to get much of my stuff for SEO (and don't want to give a monopoly to Google on it either, i want well-behaved crawlers I've never heard of to have access to it too. But not at the cost of resources i can't afford).

2OEH8eoCRo02• 9 months ago

Why don't we sue the abusive scrapers? Scraping is legal but DDoSing is not!

cupofjoakim2• 9 months ago

Not sure if that's satire or not but how would you even identify the party to sue? What do you do if they're based in a country where you can't sue them ofer relatively trivial matters as this?

2OEH8eoCRo02• 9 months ago

Not satire but it's a huge problem with the internet. Everyone washes their hands and people can harm you without liability.

immibis6• 9 months ago

You could start by subpoenaing the registered holder of the IP address.

In general, you can ask a lawyer for your options. Chances are good there are more than zero. But only if you can afford a lawyer.

If you're getting scraped from a country where you don't do business, you can block the country. It's not good to block a country, but it works as a temporary measure. If they really want your data, they will move to a country where you do business, which means a country where you can get a lawyer. Assuming you can afford a lawyer. If they're using rotating IPs, likely some of them are from your country. You might show a judge: "Hey, look, we're getting so much traffic, from a wide variety of IP addresses but it all seems to be the same person on the other end, which would make it illegal DDoS. Can we trace back some of these?" and if you're lucky, the judge might say yes.

DDoS is not a relatively trivial matter.

kelvinjps10• 9 months ago

Maybe moving the blog service to completely static and letting cloudfare pages handle it, could help?

reustle• 9 months ago

Cloudflare is not a solution. Only leading to a further centralized internet.

uvaursi4• 9 months ago

I think the OP is suggesting using a caching layer at HTTP output, and suggesting CF as an option (a quick/cheap one).

If you have an axe to grind with CF you can take it up with them, but it’s an option. Feel free to suggest others.

Ferret7446• 9 months ago

There is no better solution. DoS is fundamentally not preventable, whether in the digital realm or the physical. The only thing you can do is out-brute force the DoS. Hence Cloudflare. Hence why everything naturally centralizes to some extent (we need some word like carcinization for centralization).

ItsBob4• 9 months ago

I had a website earlier this year running on Hetzner. It was purely experimenting with some ASP.NET stuff but when looking at the logs, I noticed a shit-load of attempts at various WordPress-related endpoints.

I then read something about a guy who deliberately put a honeypot in his robots.txt file. It was pointing to a completely bogus endpoint. Now, the theory was, humans won't read robots.txt so there's no danger, but bots and the like will often read robots.txt (at least to figure out what you have... they'll ignore the "deny" for the most part!) and if they try and go to that fake endpoint you can be 100% sure (well, as close as possible) that it's not a human and you can ban them.

So I tried that.

I auto-generated a robots.txt file on the fly. It was cached for 60 seconds or so as I didn't want to expend too many resource on it. When you asked for it, you either got the cached one or I created a new one. The CPU-usage was negligible.

However, I changed the "deny" endpoint each time I built the file in case the baddies cached it, however, it still went to the same ASP.NET controller method. By hitting it, I sent a 10GB zip bomb and your IP was automatically added to the FW block list.

It was quite simple: anyone that hit that endpoint MUST be dodgy... I believe I even had comments for the humans that stumbled across it letting them know that if they went to this endpoint in their browser it was an automatic addition to the firewall blocklist.

Anyway... at first I caught a shit load of bad guys. There were thousands at first and then the numbers dropped and dropped to only tens per day.

Anyway, this is a single data point but for me, it worked... I have no regrets about the zip bomb either :)

I have another site that I'm working on so I may evolve it a bit so that you are banned for a short time and if you come back to the dodgy endpoint then I know you're a bot so into the abyss with you!

It's not perfect but it worked for me anyway.

immibis6• 9 months ago

It's interesting to study, right? This is the Internet equivalent of background radiation. Harmless in most cases. Exploit scanners aren't new to the LLM age and shouldn't overload your server - unless you're vulnerable to the exploit.

Fun fact: Some people learn about new exploits by watching their incoming requests.

ItsBob4• 9 months ago

It's interesting to study, right?

Definitely! I wasn't experiencing any issues, hell it wasn't even for public consumption at that time so no great loss to me but I found a few things fascinating (and somewhat stupid!) about it:

1. The sheer number of automated requests to scrape my content

2. That a massive number of the bots openly had "bot" or some derivative in the user agent and they were accessing a page I'd explicitly denied! :D

3. That an equally large number were faking their user agents to look like regular users and still hitting a page that a regular user couldn't possibly ever hit!

Something I did notice but it was towards the end and I didn't pursue it (I should log it better the next time for analysis!) was that the endpoint was dynamically generated and only existed in the robots.txt for a short time but there were bots I caught later on, long after that auto-generated page was created (and after the IP was banned) that still went for that same page: clearly the same entities!

My spidey senses are tingling. Next time, I'm going to log the shit out of these requests and publish as much as I can for others to analyse and dissect... might be interesting.

bob1029• 9 months ago

It's not perfect but it worked for me anyway.

This is approximately my approach minus the zip bomb. I use a piece of middleware in my AspNetCore pipeline that tracks logical resource consumption rates per IPv4. If a client trips any of the limits, their IP goes into a HashSet for a period of time. If a client has an IP in this set, they get a simple UTF8 constant string in the response body "You have exceeded resource limits, please try again later".

The other aspect of my strategy is to use AspNetCore (Kestrel). It is so fast that you can mostly ignore the noise as long as things are configured properly and you make reasonable attempts to address the edge case of an asshole trying to break your particular system on purpose. A HashSet<int> as the very first piece of middleware rejecting bad clients is exceedingly efficient. We aren't even into URL routing at this point.

I have found that attempting to catalog and record all of the naughty behavior my web server sees is the highest risk to DDOS so far. Logging lines like "banned client rejected" every time they try to come in the door is shooting yourself in the foot with regard to disk wear, IO utilization, et. al. There is no reason you should be logging all of that background radiation to disk or even thinking about it. If your web server cant handle direct exposure to the hard vacuum of space, it can be placed behind a proxy/CDN (i.e., another web server that doesn't suck).

ItsBob4• 9 months ago

If a client has an IP in this set, they get a simple UTF8 constant string in the response body "You have exceeded resource limits, please try again later".

Would a simple 429 not do the same thing? You could log repeated 429's and banish accordingly.

marcosdumay• 9 months ago

they get a simple UTF8 constant string in the response body "You have exceeded resource limits, please try again later"

I imagine they get a 429 response code, but if they don't, you may want to change that.

I do think you are on the right place in that it's important to let those requests get the correct error, so if innocent people are affected, they at least get to see there's something wrong.

psnehanshu• 9 months ago

What if it was proxied through mobile network on an unsuspecting user's phone? You risk of blocking a whole city or region.

ItsBob4• 9 months ago

I admit, my approach was rather nuclear but it worked at the time.

I think an evolution would be to use some sort of exponential backoff, e.g. first time offenders get banned for an hour, second time is 4 hours, third time and you're sent into the abyss!

Still crude but fun to play about with.

kwa32• 9 months ago

crazy how scraping became an industry

npteljes• 9 months ago

It's wild. Data is very valuable. This manifests in two fronts simultaneously: who has the data controls heavily on who sees it and under what circumstances, and on the other side, they scrape it as hard as they can.

r_singh6• 9 months ago

The Internet isn’t possible without scraping. For all the sentiment against scraping public data, doing so remains legal and essential to a lot of the services we use everyday. I think setting guidelines and shaping the web for reduced friction aimed at fair usage rather than turning it political would be the right thing to do.

intended• 9 months ago

What ? What do you mean ?

georgefrowny• 9 months ago

To be fair the heyday of unshit search was driven by mostly-consensual scraping.

Today there are far too many people scraping stuff that isn't intended to be scraped, for profit, and doing it in a heavy-handed way that actually does have a negative and continuous effect on the victim's capacity.

Everyone from AI services too lazy or otherwise unwilling to cache to companies exfiltrating some kind of data for their own commercial purposes.

ac292• 9 months ago

As posted in another comment, they run a scraping API. I think their opinion is at least slightly biased.

karlshea3• 9 months ago

There were already guidelines, these trash people aren’t following them. That’s why there’s now “sentiment” against them.

r_singh6• 9 months ago

It’s fair to be angry at abuse and "aggressive bots", but it's important to remember most large platforms—including the ones being scraped—built their own products on scraping too.

I run an e-commerce-specific scraping API that helps developers access SERP, PDP, and reviews data. I've noticed the web already has unsaid balances: certain traffic patterns and techniques are tolerated, others clearly aren’t. Most sites handle reasonable, well-behaved crawlers just fine.

Platforms claim ownership of UGC and public data through dark patterns and narrative control. The current guidelines are a result of supplier convenience, and there are several cases where absolutely fundamental web services run by the largest companies in the world themselves breach those guidelines (including those funded by the fund running this site). We need standards that treat public data as a shared resource with predictable, ethical access for everyone, not just for those with scale or lobbying power.

Cthulhu_3• 9 months ago

Well sure, but these guidelines exist, the robots.txt guidelines has been an industry-led, self-governing / self-restrictive standard. But newer bots ignore them. It'll take years for legislation to catch up, and even then it would be by country or region, not something global because that's not how the internet works.

Even if there is legislation or whatever, you can sue an OpenAI or a Microsoft, but starting a new company that does scraping and sells it on to the highest bidder is trivial.

r_singh6• 9 months ago

As the legal history around scraping shows, it’s almost always the smaller company that gets sued out of existence. Taking on OpenAI or Microsoft, as you suggest, isn’t realistic — even governments often struggle to hold them accountable.

And for the record, large companies regularly ignore robots.txt themselves: LinkedIn, Google, OpenAI, and plenty of others.

The reality is that it’s the big players who behave like the aggressors, shaping the rules and breaking them when convenient. Smaller developers aren’t the problem, they’re just easier to punish.

uvaursi4• 9 months ago

Do we shift over everything to le Dark Web and let the corpos use this one for selling their shit to consumers? These toys don’t want to play nice and there’s no real way to stop them without bringing in things like Real ID and other verifications that infringe on anonymity.

Chabsff3• 9 months ago

The bots flock to where the data is. Moving to a different network is just begging for the bots to tag along.

uvaursi4• 9 months ago

We can set different rules on these networks however. We can choose to be choosy at the gate.

y-zon128• 9 months ago

Auto-restart the reverse-proxy if bandwidth usage drops to zero for more than 2 minutes

It's understandable in your case as you have traffic coming in constantly, but first thing that came to my mind is a loop of contant reboots - again, very unlikely in your case. Sometimes such blanket rules hit me due to most unexpected reasons, like the proxy somehow failed to start serving traffic in the given timeframe.

Though I completely appreciate and agree with the 'ship now something that works now' approach!

marginalia_nu• 9 months ago

Open port 80 and log the results. Even if you don't announce your service anywhere the baseline request rate is way above 2 rpm.

Every open port of every IP is continuously scanned for exploits.

Havoc• 9 months ago

monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

I bet it’s free VPN apps

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

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