Comment by thayne 13 hours ago
Are you sure it isn't a DDoS masquerading as Amazon?
Requests coming from residential ips is really suspicious.
Edit: the motivation for such a DDoS might be targeting Amazon, by taking down smaller sites and making it look like amazon is responsible.
If it is Amazon one place to start is blocking all the the ip ranges they publish. Although it sounds like there are requests outside those ranges...
Yes, but the point is that big company crawlers aren’t paying for questionably sourced residential proxies.
If this person is seeing a lot of traffic from residential IPs then I would be shocked if it’s really Amazon. I think someone else is doing something sketchy and they put “AmazonBot” in the user agent to make victims think it’s Amazon.
You can set the user agent string to anything you want, as we all know.
I used to work for malware detection for a security company, and we looked at residential IP proxy services.
They are very, very, very expensive for the amount of data you get. You are paying for per bit of data. Even with Amazon's money, the number quickly become untenable.
It was literally cheaper for us to subscribe to business ADSL/cable/fiber optic services to our corp office buildings and thrunk them together.
Yes, people have probably analyzed Alexa traffic once or twice over the years.
You joke, but do people analyze it continuously forever also? Because if we’re being paranoid, that’s something you’d need to do in order to account for random updates that are probably happening all the time.
>> but the point is that big company crawlers aren’t paying for questionably sourced residential proxies.
> I worked for Microsoft doing malware detection back 10+ years ago, and questionably sourced proxies were well and truly on the table
Big Company Crawlers using questionably sourced proxies - this seems striking. What can you share about it?
It’s not residential proxies. It’s Amazon using IPs they sublease from residential ISPs.
Wild. While I'm sure the service is technically legal since it can be used for non-nefarious purposes, signing up for a service like that seems like a guarantee that you are contributing to problematic behavior.
You should check your websites like grass dot io (I refuse to give them traffic).
They pay you for your bandwidth while they resell it to 3rd parties, which is why a lot of bot traffic looks like it comes from residential IPs.