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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.
Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.
I think I used to do something similar with email spam traps. Not sure if it's still around but basically you could help build NaCL lists by posting an email address on your website somewhere that was visible in the source code but not visible to normal users, like in a div that was way on the left side of the screen.
Anyway, spammers that do regular expression searches for email addresses would email it and get their IPs added to naughty lists.
I'd love to see something similar with robots.
but with all of the cloud resources now, you can switch through IP addresses without any trouble. hell, you could just browse by IP6 and not even worry with how cheap those are!
That's when Google's browser DRM thing starts sounding like a good idea 😭
Even better. Build a WordPress plugin to do this.
I’m the idiot human that digs through robots.txt and the site map to see things that aren’t normally accessible by an end user.
"Help, my website no longer shows up in Google!"
Yeah, this is a pretty classic honeypot method. Basically make something available but inaccessible to the normal user. Then you know anyone who accesses it is not a normal user.
I’ve even seen this done with Steam achievements before; There was a hidden game achievement which was only available via hacking. So anyone who used hacks immediately outed themselves with a rare achievement that was visible on their profile.
That’s a bit annoying as it means you can’t 100% the game as there will always be one achievement you can’t get.
perhaps not every game is meant to be 100% completed
There are tools that just flag you as having gotten an achievement on Steam, you don't even have to have the game open to do it. I'd hardly call that 'hacking'.
robots.txt is purely textual; you can't run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn't intend to follow robots.txt wouldn't query it.
If it doesn't get queried that's the fault of the webscraper. You don't need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:
Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn't pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.
server {
name herebedragons.example.com; root /dev/random;
}
Nice idea! Better use
/dev/urandomthrough, as that is non blocking. See here.I actually love the data-poisoning approach. I think that sort of strategy is going to be an unfortunately necessary part of the future of the web.
You're second point is a good one, but you absolutely can log the IP which requested robots.txt. That's just a standard part of any http server ever, no JavaScript needed.
You'd probably have to go out of your way to avoid logging this. I've always seen such logs enabled by default when setting up web servers.
People not intending to follow it is the real reason not to bother, but it's trivial to track who downloaded the file and then hit something they were asked not to.
Like, 10 minutes work to do right. You don't need js to do it at all.
Better yet, point the crawler to a massive text file of almost but not quite grammatically correct garbage to poison the model. Something it will recognize as language and internalize, but severely degrade the quality of its output.
Maybe one of the lorem ipsum generators could help.
a bad-bot .htaccess trap.