Submitted 2 days ago by benagain@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c8af040f-6564-4fc1-aea7-1e58b4df03d0.jpeg
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.
It’s a shame we don’t have those banner ad schemes anymore. Cybersquatting could be a viable income stream if you could convince the cleaners to click banner ads for a faction of a penny each.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
AI bots killing the internet again? You don’t say
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.
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.
You can also use crowdsec on your server to stop similar BS. They use a community based blacklist. You choose what you want to block. Check it out.
I’m going to try and implement crowdsec for all my ProxMox containers over Cloudflare tunnels. Wish me luck and that my wife and kids let me do this without constantly making shot up fore to do.
Good luck and if you need help drop by their discord. They have an active community.
I had to pull an all nighter to fix some unoptimized query because I had just launched a new website with barely any visitors and hadn’t implemented caching yet for something that I thought no one uses anyway, but a bot found it and broke my entire DB through hitting the endpoint again and again until nothing worked anymore
That’s insane… Can’t a website owner require bots (at least those who are identifying themselves as such) to prove at least they’re affiliated with a certain domain?
I don’t know what “12,181+181” means but absolutely not 1.2181 × 10^185^. That many requests can’t be made within the 39 × 10^9^ bytes of bandwidth − in fact, they exceed the number of atoms on Earth times its lifetime in microseconds (that’s close to 10^70^). Also, “0+51” in another row would be dubious exponential notation, the exponent should be 0 (or omitted) if the mantissa (and thus the value represented) is 0.
Can you just turn the robots.txt into a click wrap agreement to charge robots high fees for access above a certain threshold?
why do a agreement when you can serve a zip bomb :D
Puts the full EU regulations in robot.txt
fracking clankers.
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
I recently added Anubis and its validation rate is under 40%. In other words, 60% of the incoming requests are likely bots and are now getting blocked. Definitely recommend.
I was a single server with only me and 2 others or so, and then saw that I had thousands of requests per minutes at times! Absolutely nuts! My cloud bill was way higher. Adding anubis and it dropped down to just our requests, and bills dropped too. Very very strong proponent now.
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.
Unknown Robot is your biggest fan.
Downloading you wallpapers? Lol what for
What is the blog about? It may be increased interest as search providers use them for normal searches now… or it could be a couple of already sentient doombots.
Please don’t be a blog about von Neumann probes. Please don’t be a blog about von Neumann probes. Please don’t be a blog about von Neumann probes…
What’s wrong with blogs about von Neumann probes? Genuinely curious!
If an ai read it several thousand times, I thought it was too on the nose joke sorry
I want to search for a blog on this now…
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.
LOL Someone took exception to your use of Cloudflare. Hilarious. Anyways, yeah, what Cloudflare doesn’t get, pFsense does.
Hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby type shit
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).
Awstats
I thought I recognized it. Hell of a blast from the past, haven’t seen it in fifteen years at least.
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.
Had the same thing happen on one of my servers. Got up one day a few weeks ago and the server was suspended (luckily the hosting provider unsuspended it for me quickly).
It’s mostly business sites, but we do have an old personal blog on there with a lot of travel pictures on it, and 4 or 5 AI bots were just pounding it. Went from 300GB per month average to 5TB on August, and 10/11 TB in September and October.
Looks for me like actions of AI agents.
hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fucking hell.
Yeah and that’s why people are using cloudflare so much.
artyom@piefed.social 2 days ago
One corporation DDOS’s your server to death so that you need the other corporations’ protection.
MaggiWuerze@feddit.org 2 days ago
basically protection racket
muffedtrims@lemmy.world 2 days ago
That’s a nice website you gots there, would be ashame if something weres to happen to it.
Lee@retrolemmy.com 2 days ago
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.
MinFapper@startrek.website 1 day ago
It’s interesting that anubis has worked so well for you in practice.
What do you think of this guy’s take?
https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html