I've been managing websites for years, including maintaining around 20 sites right now. Recently, three of those sites experienced unusual traffic spikes over 1-2 days, with volumes 20 to 200 times normal levels. After checking with my web host, we suspect this traffic isn't real but rather coming from bots or virtual servers, evidenced by strange viewport sizes, odd user agent strings, and traffic from countries like Brazil that usually don't engage with our content. Initially, I thought this could be a DDoS attack, but they were easy to stop and didn't persist. Instead, I believe it might be poorly implemented scrapers. Has anyone else noticed similar spikes lately, and if so, what do you think the cause is?
5 Answers
Yeah, this happens more often than you'd think. Set up Cloudflare for better bot detection. I had similar issues where traffic methods tried to use GET/POST on routes that shouldn’t allow it. Blocking those requests with Cloudflare was pretty effective.
I've seen this happen a lot too! Usually, it’s due to poorly coded scrapers, rather than DDoS. Check your ngix or Cloudflare logs for repeated user agents and those unusual viewport sizes. You can block by patterns like that, and using rate limits or a JS challenge can help too, though it won’t catch everything.
I've noticed some traffic spikes coming from services like hostedscan. It might be someone looking for vulnerabilities or doing scans. A simple fix is to block those user agents or IP addresses related to them.
These bot spikes can feel overwhelming at first, but often just end up fizzling out once filtered. It seems more like messy scraping than a direct attack, especially now with the rise of AI.
I think some of this might be related to AI. There seems to be a rise in AI tools visiting sites, probably trying to gather data. Cloudflare can really assist by filtering out these non-human visitors.
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