Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot

Every server with port 80/443 open has thousands of hits a day from random boxes looking for wordpress login pages. The only new thing is that they're pretending to be a different type of annoying bot. There's a new layer of sophistication and subterfuge, but it's the same junk traffic we've always dealt with.

On average about 100 (TCP) requests hit my home router per minute doing various probing and scanning. Lots of checking for the telnet port obviously. Sometimes you can see a swarm of entirely different IPs scanning the full port range (probing the ports one-by-one).

You'll see a lot of deepfield, censys-scanner, visionheight.com, shadowserver.io, etc., but also the usual suspects of Chinese or Russian IPs.

With OpenWRT I use something like this: `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn'`, or alternatively `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn and not port 44000'`, if we have some torrent client running (e.g. here at port 44000) which would mess up the result. I'm not sure it's the best way to handle this, but it's definitely enlightening what bounces off on the router.

How about them apples... ai bots use faked browser user agents, so people start pretending to be ai instead...

Many of those user-agents listed are often faked. Look up which ASN owns their IP. If I block most VPS providers most of the faked bots vanish. There are still some running from residential and phones using hijacked code (readers that are not really just readers but really multipurpose proxies). On that note, do not trust the linked source code but rather decompile the live code your phone is running and have AI analyze it.

Just in case any of the authors read HN, I'm getting a pretty crazy rendering bug on this page, where a bunch of the contents are redrawing up and down by a few pixels. It seemed to go away with resizing the width a few times, but I didn't look into it too hard. My page width was probably small on first draw. Incredibly distracting though and hard to read with the text moving. Using latest chrome, and it occurred on more than one page refresh. I didn't dig in beyond that though.

I recently blogged about some Cloudflare Workers I developed to combat this type of traffic: https://code.backwater.systems/blog/#2026-06-29T23:40:00.000...

Why would you voluntarily pretend to be a AI bot, when those have already a much higher chance of being blocked? Seems holly unproductive.

Best hypothesis I can come up with is to somehow make the AI companies look bad, but they seem to be doing an excellent job at that themselves already by scraping everyone hundreds of times per hour over and over.

Interesting thought: what if the idea of an open internet is over.

What if we're now moving into a world of strictly KYC. The same way "The Facebook" generated massive revenue by creating a KYC world.

Man, this "someone" guy sounds like a real jerk!

Someone is always running mass vulnerability scans. That's a "water is wet" state of the Internet.

This kind of stuff is getting pretty wild, even for using something like Cloudflare it seems like a good idea to have another layer behind it that's non-cloudflare for when vulnerabilities are discovered.

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