In 2026, some sites get up to 80% of their traffic from bots. Some bots are good, like search engines, but sometimes they ignore robots.txt and start crawling to thousands of pages deep on a calendar page, when your site definitely has no content from March 1919 or July 2082. Attackers also develop a new technique every few months, one of the more popular recent tricks are fake user agents coming from residential IP addresses.
This session will use real-world examples to demonstrate how bots are eating up your site resources and some practical techiques for managing bots and cyber attacks.
- Varnish tricks: stripping query parameters, user agent detection, datacenter traffic detection, ja3/ja4 fingerprinting, path-specific rules and redirects.
- Anubis: a lightweight open source "screener" to allow regular browsers in while keeping out most bots.
- Advanced firewall rules: Block attacks like SQL injection, forced login, cross-site scripting, command execution, traversal. I use Fastly Advanced WAF / Signal Sciences, but the techniques can apply to other tools.
- Using a private OpenClaw instance and Grafana to quickly analyze traffic and suggest mitigations to active crawls.
Ryan is a Technical Account Manager at amazee.io, a web hosting company that provides customized kubernetes-based hosting with Fastly CDN and their Advanced WAF in front.
