frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Tell HN: Amazonbot aggressively scraping my website and ignoring robots.txt

6•pera•2h ago
At the beginning of the year I decided to set up a scraping and LLM honeypot on one of my personal websites which included a fake git repo with code containing fake HTTP endpoints. The address to this repo was hidden in a public page inside a comment.

About three weeks ago IP addresses from Amazon Searchbot attempted to make requests to the fake endpoints included inside a shell script.

My robots.txt explicitly includes Amazonbot.

I am honestly surprised that this is coming from Amazon. Is this kind of behavior legal?

Comments

KellyCriterion•2h ago
Ah, if its only Amazon, then you are in a good position :-))

I hosted a small website with some newfeeds and it got killed by all the AI scrapers in the end.

toomuchtodo•2h ago
Respecting robots.txt is not a legal obligation. If you don’t want the traffic, ban the offending IP block or ASN, or put the origin behind Cloudflare for their crawler blocker.

You could go down the rabbit hole and try to find someone at Amazon to tell their crawler to chill. Don’t expect success but would make a fun blog post.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/how-to-block-ai-crawl...

pera•2h ago
My concern is more in relation to trying to use an endpoint from non-public source code, it seems negligent to randomly try endpoints like this
toomuchtodo•2h ago
Whether it’s negligent isn’t terribly relevant. Is it illegal? It is not, they aren’t bypassing access controls. No different than using Shodan, scanning public IPs, crawling open directories, etc.

It would be different if they were attempting to brute force credentials to access an endpoint, but they aren’t.

Bender•2h ago
Assuming your site has no dependency on Amazon EC2:

    fetch_aws()
    {
     curl -s \
     -H "Accept-Charset: UTF-8" \
     -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" \
     -H "Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" \
     -H "Accept-Language: en" \
     -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 11.1; rv:102.0; ) Gecko/20100101" \
     -H "Cache-Control: 0" \
     -H "Host: ip-ranges.amazonaws.com" \
     -H "Connection: keep-alive" \
     --referer https://ec2.amazon.com/ \
     -o /dev/shm/aws.json \
     --url "https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json"
    grep ip_prefix /dev/shm/aws.json | awk -F "\"" '{print $4}' | sort -n | uniq
    rm -f /dev/shm/aws.json;
    };
Make sure that gives you CIDR blocks, then add it to a script and use a for loop to

    for AWS in $(fetch_aws);do ip route add blackhole "${AWS}" 2>/dev/null

Google and Cloudflare if you need them:

    get_google()
    {
    for line in $(dig +short txt _cloud-netblocks.googleusercontent.com | tr " " "\n" | grep include | cut -f 2 -d :)                                                           
    do                                                                                                                                                                          
            dig +short txt "${line}"                                                                                                                                            
    done | tr " " "\n" | grep ip4 | cut -f 2 -d : | sort -n | uniq
    }
    
    get_cloudflare()
    {
    curl -A Mozilla "https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv"|grep -Ev "::|/32"|awk -F "," '{print $1}'|sort | uniq
    }
This assumes you have no need to connect to or get connections from Amazon on your web server. If your server is an instance in Amazon that will break DNS resolution unless you are using something outside of AWS for DNS. The gateway should still work just fine. Obviously test from an out of band console if that is an option. This is easier to maintain if you remove DNS records for IPv6 and eventually disable IPv6 listeners.

If you paste a couple of lines of the bots from your access logs I can offer more suggestions in the event they try from outside of Amazon.

If you want to have some fun, add a hidden link only the bot will see that points to http://cpanel.yourdomain.tld/ after adding a DNS record for cpanel that points to 169.254.169.254 so they start scraping the AWS cloud-init IP.

Era24UK•42m ago
Which website platform are you using and hosting provider to support your need?
pera
•
6m ago
Thanks, the Amazonbot IPs that accessed my honeypot are in this other list:

https://developer.amazon.com/amazonbot/searchbot-ip-addresse...

By the way, they used false user-agents.

Ask HN: How are you using AI to learn?

4•mfalcon•43m ago•2 comments

Which web browser has no AI?

7•lilerjee•2h ago•9 comments

Tell HN: Amazonbot aggressively scraping my website and ignoring robots.txt

6•pera•2h ago•7 comments

Ask HN: Should organizations be allowed to have all types of personl data(X.com)

3•dfps•3h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: When did we go from agentic loops to graphs?

2•grandimam•4h ago•1 comments

Wyro – Draw a backend on a canvas, export TypeScript with no lock-in

3•Paaul01•8h ago•1 comments

Tell HN: HackerOne Announces Mandatory identity verification

17•0xmattf•1d ago•1 comments

Ask HN: What did you learn last month? (July 2026)

12•bhu1st•21h ago•8 comments

Ask HN: How did your boss's behavior change with the rise of AI?

6•aredirect•13h ago•5 comments

Everything that happens in a US airport is under duress

16•dfps•1d ago•21 comments

Strategic Oil Reserves Down to a Record Low Two-Week Supply

19•megamike•1d ago•19 comments

OpenAI Usage Reset 4th time in 7d

2•bavovna•16h ago•4 comments

Ask HN: When a post of yours does well, do you know why?

5•john_builds•1d ago•5 comments

What's Happening with IT Hiring?

3•hannibalevit•20h ago•8 comments

Tell HN: System76 has critical firmware issues unresolved for over 3 years

6•jaime-ez•20h ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Any tips for a college freshman enrolled in computer science?

30•NotParth11•6h ago•58 comments

Ask HN: What's the Point of Your Startup?

8•sawyers•1d ago•17 comments

Random Thoughts of Lineage and Death

3•kooi•21h ago•0 comments

MiniMax H3: Open weights Omni-modal model

5•ignoramous•18h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's your monthly personal AI budget?

4•thatgloomyguy•1d ago•3 comments

DeepSeek API service will soon adopt a peak-valley pricing strategy

2•sschueller•1d ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Has Claude Code been (mostly) usable for you?

3•mark_l_watson•1d ago•5 comments

Ask HN: Anyone got DeepSeek-v4-flash-0731 running using antirez/ds4?

3•freakynit•18h ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Can Apple Ever Be Disrputed?

7•Taikhoom2010•1d ago•23 comments

Ask HN: What E-Reader to Buy?

6•conor_f•1d ago•9 comments

You've reached the end!