Every server with port 80/443 open has thousands of hits a day from random boxes looking for wordpress login pages. The only new thing is that they're pretending to be a different type of annoying bot. There's a new layer of sophistication and subterfuge, but it's the same junk traffic we've always dealt with.
Think about how many webmaster and business owners' egos are stroked by all the traffic they are getting, when in actuality they are often just serving thousands of bots.
Could be because of number of pages you have. At work we have several million public content pages, so a few badly behaving bots can already do a lot of damage.
For my personal website it’s 10x more bots but I barely notice because it’s a few pages.
I recently brought up a website on a never-before-seen .com domain. Within about 10 mins of bringing it up with a SSL certificate, Anthropic came knocking on the door requesting the front page. (Almost certainty due to them watching the Public Certificate Transparency logs)
I am always surprised that its considered legal.
IMO that's the same as going on the street door by door and checking if one is left open to steal everything inside the house...
That sort of vulnerability scanning is at best legally dubious, and almost certainly illegal under CFAA and similar state statues when there's clear criminal intent. That's why the 2022 DOJ guidance regarding non-prosecution good faith security research was such a big deal at the time.
> IMO that's the same as going on the street door by door and checking if one is left open to steal everything inside the house...
From experience: this does happen regularly in some neighborhoods of some cities in the US, and even that isn't always an enforcement priority. So lack of enforcement on the internet, where most the perpetrators probably aren't even in a jurisdiction with an extradition treaty, isn't exactly surprising.
This is so true. Every junior sysadmin I have trained over the years (including myself) has had a “are we being attacked?!” moment when tasked with WAF report analysis, monitoring fail2ban logs, etc.
Monitoring WAN traffic really gets the paranoia juices flowing.
People or their agents must be accidentally committing or publishing their repository level secrets and configs with enough regularity that it’s worth scanning.
There are a few novel ones but I’ve been seeing most of them in my logs for longer than generative AI has existed. This isn’t remotely new, the vector is just getting bigger.
On average about 100 (TCP) requests hit my home router per minute doing various probing and scanning. Lots of checking for the telnet port obviously. Sometimes you can see a swarm of entirely different IPs scanning the full port range (probing the ports one-by-one).
You'll see a lot of deepfield, censys-scanner, visionheight.com, shadowserver.io, etc., but also the usual suspects of Chinese or Russian IPs.
With OpenWRT I use something like this: `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn'`, or alternatively `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn and not port 44000'`, if we have some torrent client running (e.g. here at port 44000) which would mess up the result. I'm not sure it's the best way to handle this, but it's definitely enlightening what bounces off on the router.
The easiest way to deal with the usual suspects is to just block the entire countries network range(s). There really is no reason they should be connecting to your home router anyway, and you lose nothing from blocking them.
Sure their packets will still hit your router, but if they are dropped immediately at least you're not wasting a syn-ack on them.
I, temporarly, banned some ip range.
I didn't find a source for pinpointing countries; though I am interested. Could you point me to some sources which, deterministically, resolve to some countries? To my knowledge you can not reliably identify countries by ip since this would be dependent on DNS servers. Though I am just a application programmer!
Your router doesn't care about their DNS settings. IP addresses are very easy to tie back to countries. The reason they say it's not reliable is because it's trivial to spoof the country, but even so, a lot of attackers don't even bother. It's sort of like the Nigerian prince scam calls: if you're wise enough to block Russia, you're not worth their time.
Your firewall vendor should supply you with country lists, just select the known bad ones and drop their traffic. If you have a consumer grade router, you will probably have to configure the blocklists manually.
I have ubiquity UniFi for this reason (amongst others). OpenWRT is a good choice as well. Most home router software is such junk, might as well leave the door open..
Many of those user-agents listed are often faked. Look up which ASN owns their IP. If I block most VPS providers most of the faked bots vanish. There are still some running from residential and phones using hijacked code (readers that are not really just readers but really multipurpose proxies). On that note, do not trust the linked source code but rather decompile the live code your phone is running and have AI analyze it.
Is there an easy way to block any requests originating from VPS etc instead of residential/commercial IP from legitimate users ? I know cloudflare does a few things but I really want to figure out a way to block any request say at nginx or caddy (reverse proxy) from reaching origin servers if they are not from an IP that is not a VPS etc.
There are several methods. [1] The most aggressive method-02 on my document will block VPS and some data-centers but that also means it will block some legit users that are on a VPN. Most VPNs transit a data-center. If experimenting with these methods use a test server that you do not care about and set up a dummy site and ask people in your circle of friends to test it. I have to step away for a bit but if you have questions I will try to answer.
I second this. When I have tested blocking VPS/data-centers to my silly blog there were about a dozen people on HN [1] that could not view my site out of the roughly ~17,000 that could. It's not a big number but those are real people and they count.
Yes but it’s not cheap. Maxmind and ipinfo etc sell a tier that tells you this information, then you can 403 based on it.
But the price is nuts like $40,000 a year.
I work for IPinfo. We offer IPinfo Lite for free. With a little bit of time in identifying the ASNs, you can implement a decent way to block a good number of bots fairly easily using the free data alone.
Yeah, that's exactly what these visits are: faked user agents that fail IP verification or Web Bot Auth. What's interesting is the surge across so many websites in the last week.
There are many possibilities but one of them could be some new vuln was released and they are looking for it. That would require looking at the URL's they are requesting. Botters run their own purpose built campaigns. Do you also have a summary of URL's requested by unique counts?
Same for the origin IP address. The fiber leaving your country is tapped, and those people can inject packets with any origin IP that they want. Your ISP has no way to check if their peer actually received a certain packet from a certain country or not.
From a technical perspective, all this "china/russia" attribution is built on a quite shaky foundation. As a sysadmin you'd never know if it would be the British crown attacking your European company instead.
Not minimizing nation state cyber crime here, but the packet goes through many hands with different incentives.
Problem here is there are not single fibers attaching (most) countries, but a bunch of them. If you control both the ingress and egress for some particular users it's possible, but if you don't then your probing packing may end up back in China with a lot of evidence of backscatter.
Why would you voluntarily pretend to be a AI bot, when those have already a much higher chance of being blocked? Seems holly unproductive.
Best hypothesis I can come up with is to somehow make the AI companies look bad, but they seem to be doing an excellent job at that themselves already by scraping everyone hundreds of times per hour over and over.
Because businesses dont want them blocked, that would be a very stupid thing for most of them to do given its becoming a vital traffic source now that people are using chatbots instead of google.
Definitely, the point here though is there is a stat sig surge in the chart in the last week, across thousands of websites. At least a surge in this particular spoofing pattern.
This is a random sample of completely unrelated websites, which indicates that the total scale is much larger. This is not saying that it is difficult to make thousands of requests.
Is this your company? If it is, your cheerleading makes you very hard to trust. If it’s not, I’m sure that everyone gets the point - you adore everything about this research and can’t see any possible problems.
I think this is more of a "if you left your AI tools exposed someone is looking for them" change. Hacking someone else's agents sounds like a great way to spend less on your own tokens.
This kind of stuff is getting pretty wild, even for using something like Cloudflare it seems like a good idea to have another layer behind it that's non-cloudflare for when vulnerabilities are discovered.
For my personal website it’s 10x more bots but I barely notice because it’s a few pages.
New hotness: DNS-less
> IMO that's the same as going on the street door by door and checking if one is left open to steal everything inside the house...
From experience: this does happen regularly in some neighborhoods of some cities in the US, and even that isn't always an enforcement priority. So lack of enforcement on the internet, where most the perpetrators probably aren't even in a jurisdiction with an extradition treaty, isn't exactly surprising.
Monitoring WAN traffic really gets the paranoia juices flowing.
You'll see a lot of deepfield, censys-scanner, visionheight.com, shadowserver.io, etc., but also the usual suspects of Chinese or Russian IPs.
With OpenWRT I use something like this: `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn'`, or alternatively `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn and not port 44000'`, if we have some torrent client running (e.g. here at port 44000) which would mess up the result. I'm not sure it's the best way to handle this, but it's definitely enlightening what bounces off on the router.
Sure their packets will still hit your router, but if they are dropped immediately at least you're not wasting a syn-ack on them.
Thanks in advance.
Your firewall vendor should supply you with country lists, just select the known bad ones and drop their traffic. If you have a consumer grade router, you will probably have to configure the blocklists manually.
[1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Som...
Blocklist download and configuration: https://knock-knock.net/blocklist
Honeypot dashboard, where you can see attempted attacks in realtime: http://knock-knock.net
API: http://knock-knock.net/api
No, because legitimate users do not just use residential and "commercial" IPs. Like me, right now
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060945
From a technical perspective, all this "china/russia" attribution is built on a quite shaky foundation. As a sysadmin you'd never know if it would be the British crown attacking your European company instead.
Not minimizing nation state cyber crime here, but the packet goes through many hands with different incentives.
Best hypothesis I can come up with is to somehow make the AI companies look bad, but they seem to be doing an excellent job at that themselves already by scraping everyone hundreds of times per hour over and over.
What if we're now moving into a world of strictly KYC. The same way "The Facebook" generated massive revenue by creating a KYC world.
Any random bozo can trigger that.