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Bot Armies and My Little Wikis – A Strange Tale

Okay, so, this is a weird one. I’ve been running a couple of small wikis and a web dictionary, mostly as a little project to show off some development work I’ve been doing. Nothing fancy, just a couple of sites I built myself. I like tinkering, and it’s a good way to keep skills sharp.

Recently, though, things got… intense. I started seeing a massive spike in database activity. It felt like a digital swarm was constantly hitting my sites. At first, I thought it was just a lot of regular users browsing, but then I dug a little deeper, and it became clear: something wasn’t right.

The Signatures of the Bots

I started looking at the HTTP requests coming in. And that’s where things got really strange. These bots weren’t just randomly hitting the pages. They were following patterns, and they were leaving some *very* odd clues.

First, a lot of the User-Agent strings were using incredibly outdated Chrome versions – versions that shouldn’t even exist anymore. Like, seriously old ones. Then, they were mixing and matching browsers and platforms like crazy – Chrome, Android, Safari, Linux, Windows, macOS… it was like a bot dream. And the referral headers? They were overwhelmingly pointing back to Google.

But the biggest clue was the IP range: 43.128/10. That range just *screamed* “bot” to me. It was a huge concentration of addresses, and most of them were clearly associated with automated scraping tools.

Fighting Back – Sort Of

My first instinct was to block these IP ranges using my server’s firewall. And it *did* help, reducing the load considerably. But it was like whack-a-mole. As soon as I blocked one range, another would pop up, often from a different location around the globe. It was exhausting.

I then took a slightly more targeted approach. I added a couple of suspicious User-Agent strings to my IIS request filter. Essentially, I told the server, “Hey, if you see a request with *this* User-Agent, block it.” And surprisingly, that seemed to do the trick. The attack slowed way down, and the logs showed significantly fewer suspicious requests.

A Larger Context – The Perplexity AI Story

While I was battling my little bot army, I stumbled across a story on The Register about Perplexity AI. They were accused of scraping content from websites without permission, using unlisted IP ranges. It was fascinating because it felt like a parallel situation, highlighting how sophisticated scraping tools can be used, and how difficult it can be to track them down.

It really made me think about the scale of automated scraping and how it’s impacting websites like mine – small, personal projects that I built to showcase my skills. It’s not just about the data; it’s about respect for the effort that goes into creating content.

Lessons Learned (and a Bit of Frustration!)

This whole experience was a learning curve, to say the least. I learned a lot about how bots operate, how to identify their signatures, and how to defend against them. It was frustrating, definitely, constantly reacting to a threat. But it also reinforced the importance of monitoring your web server’s activity and being prepared to take action when something seems amiss.

And honestly, it’s a reminder that even the smallest projects can attract unwanted attention. It’s just… weird.