When Wouter Groeneveld tried accessing his Brain Baking blog recently, he encountered ominous delays. His server's CPU was maxed out—not from legitimate traffic, but from an army of scraping bots systematically attacking his Gitea instance. Logs showed hundreds of requests per second targeting repository paths like /content/links.md and /commit/ directories, all from IPs within the 47.79.0.0/16 range. Despite defenses like Fail2ban, the assault temporarily knocked his server offline—a scenario becoming tragically common for independent web operators.

Anatomy of an Attack

Groeneveld's forensic analysis revealed sophisticated evasion tactics:
- Spoofed User Agents: Bots masqueraded as legitimate Chrome browsers (Mozilla/5.0... Chrome/140.0.0.0), bypassing basic bot detection.
- Distributed Sourcing: Attacks originated from multiple IPs under Alibaba (US) Technology's AS45102 network, complicating blacklisting.
- Strange Referrers: Fake referral headers from bioware.com and microsoft.com suggested attempts to mimic organic traffic.

"Fail2ban was struggling to keep up... The only thing that had immediate effect was sudo iptables -I INPUT -s 47.79.0.0/16 -j DROP," Groeneveld noted, highlighting the inefficiency of reactive defenses against industrialized scraping.

The Broader Crisis for Independent Web

This incident reflects a systemic threat:
1. Resource Exhaustion: Scrapers consume disproportionate bandwidth/CPU, forcing hobbyists onto centralized platforms like Cloudflare.
2. Defensive Complexity: Maintaining robust protections (e.g., Anubis, custom iptables rules) drains time better spent on creation.
3. Centralization Pressure: As Groeneveld laments, moving to Codeberg or corporate CDNs means sacrificing the indie web's ethos.

Why Scrapers Target Small Sites

  • AI Training Data Harvesting: Personal blogs and code repositories are goldmines for LLM training datasets.
  • Vulnerability Prospecting: /commit paths can reveal unpatched security flaws in software projects.
  • SEO Manipulation: Content scraping fuels spam sites and keyword farming operations.

Fighting Back Without Surrendering

Groeneveld advocates layered resistance:
- Aggressive IP Blocking: Pre-emptively banning high-risk ASNs like Alibaba's problematic ranges.
- Log Analysis Automation: Scripts to flag path patterns (e.g., all requests containing "/commit/").
- Protocol Hardening: Moving critical services like Gitea off public-facing servers.

Yet the deeper cost is existential: "A portion of the software hobbyist in me dies," he writes. As scraping operations industrialize, the internet's creative periphery faces extinction—pushing innovation toward walled gardens. Groeneveld's resolve—"I refuse to give in"—echoes across the shrinking frontier of independent web hosting.

Source: Brain Baking