Abusive AI Web Crawlers: Get Off My Lawn

A massive botnet, likely comprised of compromised Android set-top boxes, is flooding websites with fraudulent requests. One shared hosting server received 1.5 million fake requests daily from 290,000 unique IP addresses. The attack uses randomly generated User-Agents and single requests from each IP, making it difficult to block. Brazil is the largest source of traffic, with consumer ISPs globally affected. This has caused server strain and disrupted some legitimate users, particularly those with older computers.