Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

6 months ago

Bear Blog experienced a major outage on October 25 due to a reverse proxy failure affecting custom domains.
The outage was unnoticed longer than usual because monitoring tools failed to alert the author on a Saturday.
Three types of aggressive bots are flooding the internet: AI scrapers, malicious scrapers, and unchecked automations.
AI scrapers are identifiable and manageable, often blocked if they aim to train models rather than for user searches.
Malicious scrapers exploit vulnerabilities like misconfigured WordPress or exposed .env and .aws files, posing significant risks.
Unchecked automations, fueled by easy-to-create scrapers, are accidentally DDoSing websites at an alarming rate.
Mitigation strategies include WAF rules, rate limiting, and custom code to quarantine bad bots.
The reverse proxy was overwhelmed by a DDoS attack, leading to the outage, despite previous successful mitigations.
Future prevention measures include redundant monitoring, aggressive rate-limiting, scaling up the reverse proxy, auto-restart mechanisms, and a public status page.
The internet's increasing hostility due to bots underscores the importance of safeguarding valuable online spaces.

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