Tell HN: Amazonbot aggressively scraping my website and ignoring robots.txt
20 points - last Saturday at 7:04 PM
At the beginning of the year I decided to set up a scraping and LLM honeypot on one of my personal websites which included a fake git repo with code containing fake HTTP endpoints. The address to this repo was hidden in a public page inside a comment.
About three weeks ago IP addresses from Amazon Searchbot attempted to make requests to the fake endpoints included inside a shell script.
My robots.txt explicitly includes Amazonbot.
I am honestly surprised that this is coming from Amazon. Is this kind of behavior legal?
Comments
Meta not only ignored my robots.txt but they hit me with 1k requests per second sometimes.
BingBot is doing something weird. Based on the logs I see, it feels like their crawler is trying to reverse engineer my public facing APIs and scrape those directly.
You could go down the rabbit hole and try to find someone at Amazon to tell their crawler to chill. Don’t expect success but would make a fun blog post.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/how-to-block-ai-crawl...
I hosted a small website with some newfeeds and it got killed by all the AI scrapers in the end.
fetch_aws()
{
curl -s \
-H "Accept-Charset: UTF-8" \
-H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" \
-H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" \
-H "Accept-Language: en" \
-H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.1; rv:102.0; ) Gecko/20100101" \
-H "Cache-Control: 0" \
-H "Host: ip-ranges.amazonaws.com" \
-H "Connection: keep-alive" \
--referer https://ec2.amazon.com/ \
-o /dev/shm/aws.json \
--url "https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json"
grep ip_prefix /dev/shm/aws.json | awk -F "\"" '{print $4}' | sort -n | uniq
rm -f /dev/shm/aws.json;
};
Make sure that gives you CIDR blocks, then add it to a script and use a for loop to for AWS in $(fetch_aws);do ip route add blackhole "${AWS}" 2>/dev/null
Google and Cloudflare if you need them: get_google()
{
for line in $(dig +short txt _cloud-netblocks.googleusercontent.com | tr " " "\n" | grep include | cut -f 2 -d :)
do
dig +short txt "${line}"
done | tr " " "\n" | grep ip4 | cut -f 2 -d : | sort -n | uniq
}
get_cloudflare()
{
curl -A Mozilla "https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv"|grep -Ev "::|/32"|awk -F "," '{print $1}'|sort | uniq
}
This assumes you have no need to connect to or get connections from Amazon on your web server. If your server is an instance in Amazon that will break DNS resolution unless you are using something outside of AWS for DNS. The gateway should still work just fine. Obviously test from an out of band console if that is an option. This is easier to maintain if you remove DNS records for IPv6 and eventually disable IPv6 listeners.If you paste a couple of lines of the bots from your access logs I can offer more suggestions in the event they try from outside of Amazon.
If you want to have some fun, add a hidden link only the bot will see that points to http://cpanel.yourdomain.tld/ after adding a DNS record for cpanel that points to 169.254.169.254 so they start scraping the AWS cloud-init IP.
That is, I haven't personally seen a bad actors list that gets used in a fail2ban-like setup.