Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tamimio 721 days ago
> If you're running an ecom shop with a lot of product pages, expect a large portion of traffic to be bots and scrapers.

It's crazy; I registered a new website last month, and every day I get around ~200 visitors, for a landing page only! This site is not mentioned or advertised anywhere. The only list where you might find it is in the newly registered domains.
2 comments
jcynix 721 days ago
> The only list where you might find it is in the newly registered domains.

No registration anywhere needed, they'll find you, because you have an IP address. I've set up enough machines without any registration and some hours after they got connected, the usual suspects showed up.

And regarding bots: even if machines don't have e.g. PHP installed, they'll see oodles of attempts to access links ending in *.php. That's the place where I liked to offer randomly encrypted linux kernels for them to digest ;-)

link
tamimio 721 days ago
That’s actually a smart thing to do! I did notice the extension too, I even did notice the typical wordpress paths. I do understand for a known site, but one that was registered hours ago? Unbelievable.
link
jcynix 721 days ago
Back of the envelope calculation: there are 2^32 possible IPv4 addresses, you can easily ping about 1K addresses in parallel[1] on a standard linux machine and there are 86,400 seconds in a day. So after about 50 days you tried all possible IPv4 addresses. Now set up a farm with more than 50 machines ... e.g. as a state owned actor (or a "private" bot farm) and you'll learn about newly connected machines within hours.

[1] Did actually use 1K threads to do parallel TCP connections more than 20 years ago already, so 1K is an easily reachable lower limit nowadays. You'll need an ISP which allows that to be done ... or a distributed bot farm.

Edit: spelling

link
OutOfHere 721 days ago
> This site is not mentioned or advertised anywhere. The only list where you might find it is in the newly registered domains.

Well, that's one place already. Another is in the published list of new HTTPS certificates. As such, "not mentioned" doesn't hold true.

link
tamimio 721 days ago
> Another is in the published list of new HTTPS certificates

True, but it’s one of a millions and the amount of them is still crazy

> As such, "not mentioned" doesn't hold true.

I meant by me.

link