The Great LLM DDOS of 2025
Let me give you some numbers. A friend hosts some fairly small personal websites on my infrastructure, and I manage it for him. These were never high-traffic sites, but since May 4th at 00:00:00 UTC, his server has received over 2545000 web requests. It is, at this very moment, being scraped by multiple IP addresses associated with Alibaba US, specifically Alibaba Cloud LLC.
NetRange: 47.235.0.0 - 47.246.255.255
CIDR: 47.244.0.0/15, 47.236.0.0/14, 47.235.0.0/16, 47.246.0.0/16, 47.240.0.0/14
NetName: AL-3
NetHandle: NET-47-235-0-0-1
Parent: NET47 (NET-47-0-0-0-0)
NetType: Direct Allocation
OriginAS:
Organization: Alibaba Cloud LLC (AL-3)
The silver lining is that it's mostly static content, so not too many resources are being wasted by these AI scrapers, in this particular case.
I could block all of the public clouds. I've talked about doing it before. The drawback is that it might block something legitimate, like Internet Archive. I could also put an AI data poisoner program in between a front-facing reverse proxy and the web server hosting sites. That's reasonable, and I've talked about doing that too. But I shouldn't have to do that. I'm just a caring and sharing kind of guy with a terminal illness, who has absolutely no fucks left to give.
I'll also note that CHICKEN Scheme has been dealing with this problem.
That post has some more numbers for you. They've had a much rougher time of it because their sites used dynamic features like code crawlers and gitweb.
Addendum: On Shutting Down the NSF and Pulling up the Ladder
Nazi Salutin' Eugenics Boy Elon Musk and his band of goons are apparently shutting down the NSF. Musk and all of the other tech ghouls would not have all of the money they have without the NSF, because the NSF helped build the Internet. This is a classic case of the rich pulling up the ladder behind them. Why does this observation belong in this post? Because of the contrast and the destruction. Private companies are doing what they can to destroy the rest of the non-corporate Internet, while oligarchs and their toadies are destroying the public institutions that made the Internet -- and their extreme wealth -- possible in the first place. I'm out of words, except for maybe "eat the rich."