during my observation of the bot tsunami rolling over my sites and devoloping a clever send-em-the-frog-face tactic, I had to admit, it slows them down, but doesn’t stop them
the reality was bigger then I expected, seeing 850 /24 crawling my servers for direct image fetching (stealing) isn’t nice, even if they didn’t succeeded
not everybody is in such lucky situation to have modern server hardware with considerable heartbeat and with its feet on a solid backbone, and so, most small companies and single operator sites will suffer serious performance loss without knowing why
so I stopped being funny – to remember, showing a frog face instead of the real expected image is funny and nicer than flipping the bird, but it doesn’t help – I rewrote the attempted request to serve a 404 …
the impressive part is, in a couple of minutes the whole swell stopped, thousand of source IPs stopped crawling, wow!
impressive, because it shows the whole thing was fully orchestrated, that it wasn’t a farm of silly bots, it that was a fully planned heist running on really powerfull hardware
the 404 stopped them immediatly, that also shows their miserly and stingy operation mode, so some poor penny-pinching minds behind it, hopefull AWS charge them good prices for using their platform – make them bleed
+/- 2 hours after the sudden stop, some afterburner appeared, I remembered seeing the source IPs before with incommon behaviour during the mass attack, so I investigated those further
OTV.net … spread over several domains with country codes and .net, .com, .ca and a totally redacted whois record, after looking further to find out what they’re hiding, a name popped up, Dmytro Ahrefs … aka the botbreeder …
owner of a large variety of keyword generator and seo tools for all search platforms and plugins … all courtains felt down, the obvious came into the spot light
while running the hidden DDOS like image theft heists, he offers “detectors” and counter measures for what he does, what a ruthless and cheap operation, a mega scam to get his hands into our pockets
certainly legally intouchable because of post box addresses everywhere instead of real office installations, hidden identities and mostly targetting small hosting and website operators who don’t understand what’s happening, until they discover it, he already moved on to another target – see you later baby, try getting enough money to sew me …
here is their “generous” offer https://ahrefs.com/free-seo-tools with premium upgrades of course, not even heel is free anymore …
thanks to my persistence and stubborness when it comes to somebody stealing my photos I got free education about what great minds become when they sniff money … doubtless this guys have outstanding competence in software and marketing … unfortunately they drifted over to the bad side
that kind of people are useless for the world
I rather prefere staying poor and do fair business while transforming my exceptional software ideas into code and see it working and producing results like this journey uncovered the botbreeder’s reality, I really do not even consider those people having any personal value anymore, they lost every bit of respect and their technical capacity became worthless …
the botbreeder is now on my crap list
Leave a Reply