Tell HN: Amazonbot aggressively scraping my website and ignoring robots.txt

6 comments

• Era24UK 12 minutes ago

  Which website platform are you using and hosting provider to support your need?

• KellyCriterion 2 hours ago

  Ah, if its only Amazon, then you are in a good position :-))

  I hosted a small website with some newfeeds and it got killed by all the AI scrapers in the end.

• Bender 2 hours ago

  Assuming your site has no dependency on Amazon EC2:

      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.

• toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

  Respecting robots.txt is not a legal obligation. If you don’t want the traffic, ban the offending IP block or ASN, or put the origin behind Cloudflare for their crawler blocker.

  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...

  [-]
  • pera 2 hours ago

    My concern is more in relation to trying to use an endpoint from non-public source code, it seems negligent to randomly try endpoints like this

    [-]
    • toomuchtodo 2 hours ago

      Whether it’s negligent isn’t terribly relevant. Is it illegal? It is not, they aren’t bypassing access controls. No different than using Shodan, scanning public IPs, crawling open directories, etc.

      It would be different if they were attempting to brute force credentials to access an endpoint, but they aren’t.