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Comment by awsanswers | Hacker News Reader

Unacceptable, sorry this is happening. Do you know about fail2ban? You can have it automatically filter IPs that violate certain rules. One rule could be matching on the bot trying certain URLs. You might be able to get some kind of honeypot going with that idea. Good luck

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They said that it is coming from different ip addresses every time, so fail2ban wouldn't help.

Monitor access logs for links that only crawlers can find.

Edit: oh, I got your point now.

Amazon does publish every IP address range used by AWS, so there is the nuclear option of blocking them all pre-emptively.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ip-rang...

I'd do that, but my DNS is via route 53. Blocking AWS would block my ability to manage DNS automatically as well as certificate issuance via DNS-01.

If you only block new inbound requests, it shouldn't impact your route 53 or DNS-01 usage.

They list a service for each address, so maybe you could block all the non-Route 53 IP addresses. Although that assumes they aren’t using the Route 53 IPs or unlisted IPs for scraping (the page warns it’s not a comprehensive list).

Regardless, it sucks that you have to deal with this. The fact that you’re a customer makes it all the more absurd.

It’ll most likely eventually help, as long as they don’t have an infinite address pool.

Do these bots use some client software (browser plugin, desktop app) that’s consuming unsuspecting users bandwidth for distributed crawling?

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