Ask HN: How to stop an AWS bot sending 2B requests/month?

  • Posted 2 days ago by lgats
  • 257 points
I have been struggling with a bot– 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; crawler)' coming from AWS Singapore – and sending an absurd number of requests to a domain of mine, averaging over 700 requests/second for several months now. Thankfully, CloudFlare is able to handle the traffic with a simple WAF rule and 444 response to reduce the outbound traffic.

I've submitted several complaints to AWS to get this traffic to stop, their typical followup is: We have engaged with our customer, and based on this engagement have determined that the reported activity does not require further action from AWS at this time.

I've tried various 4XX responses to see if the bot will back off, I've tried 30X redirects (which it follows) to no avail.

The traffic is hitting numbers that require me to re-negotiate my contract with CloudFlare and is otherwise a nuisance when reviewing analytics/logs.

I've considered redirecting the entirety of the traffic to aws abuse report page, but at this scall, it's essentially a small DDoS network and sending it anywhere could be considered abuse in itself.

Are there others that have similar experience?

60 comments

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