Cleaning up bad bots (and the climate)
Sep 23, 2019John Graham-Cumming
Summary
Introduced 'Bot Fight Mode' to the Firewall settings, which when enabled, applies three actions to detected bad bots: 1) Tarpitting with computationally intensive challenges to increase bot maker CPU costs, 2) Sharing bot IPs with Bandwidth Alliance partners for takedowns, and 3) Offsetting carbon emissions from bot activity by planting trees. Detailed the four components of Cloudflare's bot detection: identification of legitimate bots, handwritten rules, the Bot Activity Detector model, and the Trusted Client model. Also mentioned Gatebot for DDoS bot fingerprinting and Firewall Rules for granular blocking. Explained the carbon offsetting calculation based on server CO2 emissions and tree sequestration capacity.
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