Comment by itintheory
17 hours ago
We implemented CrowdSec for bot/scraping mitigation. The architecture is sound, but it ended up having an unacceptable false positive rate for us. This may be an issue with any kind of IP reputation approach. After a couple of months of work getting it ready to go I had to turn it off after a couple of days.
Not sure what you implemented.
They provide several IP blacklists. None of those seem to be false positives. You can also add custom 3rd party blocklists.
They also provide several different rulesets. It is up to you to choose which ones to use and fine tune. LLMs can be very helpful with that.
And there are 3rd party dashboards and tools that help you manage it more easily.
I use the free version as a simple WAF on multiple servers and it blocks a lot of bots. It did require some initial finetuning though.
Are there any better open source solutions?
We had the main community blocklist and several of their pricey paid blocklists enabled in a PoC capacity. We had a lot of legitimate users end up blocked. In some cases these may have been VPN exit nodes, or users on CG-NAT, or devices on a shared network with some other compromised / bot device. I didn't get 100% of the details, just that we were inundated with support requests from real users that ended up blocked.
Given the number of residential proxies I see scraping the couple of sites I have responsibility for I don't find IP address-based blocking useful anymore. That ship has sailed.
Behavioral and client fingerprint analysis (ugh-- having to run Javascript just to view a static site) is the only way (at least until we get user "age" and identity attestation rammed down our throats).
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Interesting, did you implement only IP reputation (via blocklist) or did you deploy the WAF as well? Regarding bot scrapping, you would probably want to try the new bot detection feature recently released
This was just blocklist based. We had the main community list and a handful of the curated paid lists enabled.
wrt bot detection - this sounds very much like Anubis which we're also using with some success.
I have written my own honeypots to reduce the false positive rate. I simply have things like a VM with RDP and SSH open to the internet and any IP that tries to login gets banned at the firewall for x days. It works really well.