I'm curious if anybody could speculate who would be attacking a documentation silo, and to what end?
SoftTalker•22m ago
Could be testing in preparation for attacking something more critical?
lanyard-textile•9m ago
Maybe just for the pleasure of doing it, too.
davidfischer•19m ago
I'm the author of the blog. I don't know. Internally, we were half joking that we were going to get ransom notice, but we never did.
The only thing that sort of correlates with this attack is that before it started, we began rolling out some slightly more aggressive rate limits one by one. This was mostly because anytime any new "company" thinks they're going to catchup with Claude/OpenAI, they scrape us very aggressively (and they're not respectful about it). My guess is that the attackers behind this attack were already probing us (they were) and they thought the window of opportunity might be closing.
SoftTalker•17m ago
Just curious, if you're tolerant of scraping, do you make an archive of all your content available so that scraping is unnecessary, and if so do the scrapers prefer that?
davidfischer•10m ago
It's terabytes of content and other than we're the host not really related to each other. However, for most projects, it's possible to download a zip file of all the HTML docs for that project. We have a lower rate limit to pull these, but a scraper can pull thousands of docs at once. We only host a few hundred thousand projects so pulling a zip of the latest docs for all of them could be done in a day or two at a very reasonable rate.
It's also possible to request the docs already processed into markdown[1]. Lastly, basically all of the docs come from Git. A smart scraper could just clone a project's repo.
Good to know. I use your site (with a manual transmission user-agent) often, and it's fantastic. Thanks for your work and the writeup!
davidfischer•3m ago
I've never seen the phrase "manual transmission user-agent". Using your own browser yourself is the new stick shift. Love it.
bennett_dev•17m ago
Interesting that the Under Attack Mode wasn’t used at all here. I understand not wanting to break APIs but I feel temporarily challenging non-API usage could have at least helped without impacting users too much?
davidfischer•6m ago
I talked about that directly in the post. We didn't want to just challenge everyone. We use JS challenges but we try to use them sparingly. The rest of the ops team and I were fighting to stay up but it never got so bad that it was a choice between complete outage and using the Under Attack mode.
tescreal•32m ago
SoftTalker•22m ago
lanyard-textile•9m ago
davidfischer•19m ago
The only thing that sort of correlates with this attack is that before it started, we began rolling out some slightly more aggressive rate limits one by one. This was mostly because anytime any new "company" thinks they're going to catchup with Claude/OpenAI, they scrape us very aggressively (and they're not respectful about it). My guess is that the attackers behind this attack were already probing us (they were) and they thought the window of opportunity might be closing.
SoftTalker•17m ago
davidfischer•10m ago
It's also possible to request the docs already processed into markdown[1]. Lastly, basically all of the docs come from Git. A smart scraper could just clone a project's repo.
[1] https://docs.readthedocs.com/platform/stable/reference/markd...
tescreal•10m ago
davidfischer•3m ago