Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot

Bender

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.

pjc50

Someone is always running mass vulnerability scans. That's a "water is wet" state of the Internet.

yabones

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.

binaryturtle

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.

j45

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.

nate-gehringer

I recently blogged about some Cloudflare Workers I developed to combat this type of traffic: https://code.backwater.systems/blog/#2026-06-29T23:40:00.000...

andai

Man, this "someone" guy sounds like a real jerk!

Tharre

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.

blobbers

Interesting thought: what if the idea of an open internet is 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.

kevin_nisbet

Just in case any of the authors read HN, I'm getting a pretty crazy rendering bug on this page, where a bunch of the contents are redrawing up and down by a few pixels. It seemed to go away with resizing the width a few times, but I didn't look into it too hard. My page width was probably small on first draw. Incredibly distracting though and hard to read with the text moving. Using latest chrome, and it occurred on more than one page refresh. I didn't dig in beyond that though.

nubinetwork

How about them apples... ai bots use faked browser user agents, so people start pretending to be ai instead...

ChillyCapy

Fake Googlebot visits are #1 in website logs I've been working on. At the beginning I was fighting with them using Cloudflare ASN block rules or their managed Bot Fight mode but it appeared to be not only pointless, but also harmful for my websites. Bot Fight mode randomly started blocking real Bing / Google / OpenAI crawlers what wasted crawling budget and discouraged crawlers to revisit updated pages. Sometimes it's better to not fight with bots actively but harden environment and only react for the worst offenders.

wilg

Looks like Google has started rolling out this Web Bot Auth thing which seems like something that should gain adoption or become an open standard. https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher... Seems like the crawler companies would be incentivized to not want to take responsibility for people spoofing their user agents.

bytesandbits

No Small Actors.

raver1975

Sorry, my bad.

0xdeadbeefbabe

Or some thing!

walrus01

Mass automated vulnerability scans have been a very common thing since years before the advent of this in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) I remember when 'code red' spread and it had the effect of crapping up the contents of my apache server logs. Fun times. such as: GET /default.ida?NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a HTTP/1.0

oasisbob

Very similar experience here. Started July 30, sustained through August 6, when it started a significant ramp-up in volume (5x or so). Most of the traffic is originating in GCP. We're seeing ~70k req/min sustained from Google Cloud IP space (AS396982). Reported to GCP Abuse, they've been non-responsive so far. The main distinguishing factor is the reuse of a bunch of legit AI-training bot UserAgent strings. It's clear that the traffic is under the same centralized control because of how it changes volume across thousands of IP addresses simultaneously.

SpyCoder77

Why would some of these ignore robots.txt some of the time?

AlbinoDrought

I'm not sure what to blame yet, but here's traffic on a tiny side site, all from JS-capable clients: https://i.imgur.com/tdexrEI.png