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AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by lemmydev2@infosec.pub to c/pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub

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Attackers explain how an anti-spam defense became an AI weapon.

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[–] Snowcano@startrek.website 7 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Just make a custom 404 page that returns 13 MBs of junk along with status code 200

How would you go about doing this part? Asking for a friend who’s an idiot, totally not for me.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

I use Apache2 and PHP, here's what I did:

in .htaccess you can set ErrorDocument 404 /error-hole.php https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/custom-error.html

in error-hole.php,

<?php
http_response_code(200);
?>
<p>*paste a string that is 13 megabytes long*</p>

For the string, I used dd to generate 13 MBs of noise from /dev/urandom and then I converted that to base64 so it would paste into error-hole.php

You should probably hide some invisible dead links around your website as honeypots for the bots that normal users can't see.

[–] SatyrSack@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

How does this affect a genuine user who experiences a 404 on your site?

[–] owl@infosec.pub 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I don't know a lot about this, but I would guess a normal user would like a message, that says something along the lines of "404, couldn't find what you were looking for." The status code and the links back to itself as well as the 13 MBs of noise should probably not irritate them. Hidden links should also not irritate normal users.

[–] SatyrSack@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I also "don't know a lot about this", but I do know that your browser receiving a 200 means that everything worked properly. From what I can tell, this technique is replaces any and every 404 response with 200, thus tricking the browser (and therefore the user) into thinking the site is working as expected every time they run into a missing webpage on this site.

[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

The user doesn’t see the status code, they see what’s rendered to the screen.

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