Hey everyone,
A couple of things before I disappear for a few days (Maybe??)
re: The 100K IP Botnet (Update: It's Worse)
Maybe they read this blog? Because ever since I started blocking them, they didn't just stop, they doubled down.
I’ve been adding entire /24 subnet blocks to the firewall, and they just rotate to new neighborhoods. We are sitting at almost a HALF MILLION unique IP addresses now.
What are they doing? (The Technical Deep Dive)
I spent some time analyzing the access logs to figure out what exactly they are looking for. Initially, I thought they might be targeting specific high-value topics like finance or crypto.
I was wrong. It’s a vacuum.
The logs show they are abusing the pagination parameters (start_author and start_permlink). They aren't searching; they are "walking the linked list" of the blockchain history. They hit a post, grab the pagination token, and request the next batch, moving chronologically backward through time.
This confirms my suspicion: This is likely an AI training run. They don't care if the post is about guitar tabs, German poetry, or SEO spam (and they are scraping all three). They just want raw human text to feed a Large Language Model, and they are using my server as a straw to drink up the Hive/Steem history.
I still don't understand WHY though. Why not just spin up a node???
re: re: 100K IP Botnet
Despite the massive volume, I'm actually proud of two things:
- That poor little server hasn't been dDoSSed (yet?).
- My fixes to the failover and management in
hive-nectarare Rock Solid. Even with 500k bots hammering the door, it keeps serving the data they are pulling without choking.
re: hive-nectar v0.2.9
On a lighter note, @brianoflondon put in an issue last night regarding the library, and I was quick to fix it.
The Amount() class was behaving oddly. He asked if I had intentionally changed the architecture (which is on my wishlist), but the reality was much simpler: I fat-fingered the keyboard. I accidentally deleted a **kwargs in the __init__ method, so it wasn't accepting keywords. It was a literal one-line fix, and v0.2.9 is now live.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to All
I hope everyone's holiday season and New Year go well. Regardless of race, religion, or nationality. I love that Hive is global!
As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a TheCrazyGM