Cloudflare Bot

#1

Greetings to everyone,
I signed up for Cloudflare to act as a buffer between one of my sites and the outside world. I had hoped that Cloudflare would be able to stop a bot that is running from Cloud South. I created a rule to block bots and left it alone. I noticed that now my site is being hit hard by a bot from Cloudflare. This bot is hitting multiple times a minute. It is relentless. It comes from multiple IPs but a whois search points the IP’s to Cloudflare.

My questions are:
Does anyone know what this bot is?
Does anyone know why this bot is hitting my site non stop?
Does anyone know how I can block this bot?

I feel like I went backwords using Cloudflare to keep the bots away. I block one bot, only to be replaced by Cloudflare’s bot. I feel like Cloudflare is a waste.

Thanks to anyone who can help. This has become very aggravating.

Stan

#2

Cloudflare doesn’t run bots.

You’re probably seeing the regular bots, just with Cloudflare’s IPs, because everything passes through Cloudflare, so their servers are the one connecting to your server. If you want to see the real IPs behind Cloudflare, please see https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170706-How-do-I-restore-original-visitor-IP-with-Nginx- (for Nginx) or https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203656534-How-do-I-restore-original-visitor-IP-with-Apache-2-4- (for Apache)

#3

Shimi,
Thank You for your reply. About an hour after I wrote this, I realized that is exactly what was happening. I setup a firewall rules that blocked the bad guys from attempting to hit a few pages and it appears to have solved my problems.

Thanks for confirming what I had suspected.

#4

That’s not entirely true… our always online crawler is definitely a bot, but only hits a small number of pages on a site on average.

#5

My bad. I always imagined it just uses recently crawled-publicly-cached pages, but now that you mention it, I realize that it will probably get a better glimpse as an anonymous client, as all those pages can be customized…

Although in my mind there’s a difference between “crawlers” that their whole purpose is to create a cached corpus/index of pages, and a tool that has a purpose of doing human-like behavior, such as spamming message boards, registering hundreds of users, etc, which is what I think when I hear the word “bot”… but maybe I’m wrong to make this distinction…