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.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    25 days ago

    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.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      25 days ago

      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.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        25 days ago

        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.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    25 days ago

    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.

    • ikt@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      25 days ago

      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.

    • Lee@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      1·
      25 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.

    • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
      1·
      25 days ago

      One corporation DDOS’s your server to death so that you need the other corporations’ protection.

  • Thunraz@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    25 days ago

    It’s 12181 hits and the number behind the plus sign are robots.txt hits. See the footnote at the bottom of your screenshot.