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.
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.
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.
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.
Could it be a competitor for that particular product? Hired some foreign entity to hit anything related to their own product?
Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they're only picking on that one particular SKU.
Have you googled the SKU and see if anything else happens to share the number?
I have and there's nothing noteworthy, other than tons of other retailers selling the same thing of course.