It worked fine... on a small scale But it's one thing to swat flies versus fighting swarm of yellow jackets. Serving a 1MB file a million times a day on a small digitalocean droplet is not feasible. Let's just say it didn't scale. And AI bots usually come with beefier machines, and recover faster after a bomb.
replyWhy did you serve it from DigitalOcean?
replyWhy not a CDN?
It's the content of the page, the raw html, that is replaced with a zipbomb. Example: https://example.com checks if you are a malicious bot, depending on the result, it will send you gzip html or gzipped bomb. So that can't be swapped or redirected to a CDN. The bots would simply ignore the redirect.
replyThat sounds really annoying. Thanks for explaining! I'm looking to launch one of my new little products and my last one got hammered by bots.
replyThankfully they were not really malicious like some of the other folks have experienced, but it was still frustrating.