Post by @panda_abyss@lemmy.ca

2026-10-14 02:00 UTC

This story, that Cloudflare reported lower identified automated bot and API traffic from the ASN of the destroyed data centres, has been so massively warped it’s insane. It demonstrates that average people and apparently tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all. When residential proxies affect at least a third of US households, you don’t need to route through a data centre that will be flagged as bot traffic. You set up a wire guard config and route to a residential proxy installed on millions of smart TVs, android boxes, smart appliances, desktop computers, and phones. Seriously, I recently mapped multiple residential proxy networks with over 30 million unique US ips that were just scraping. You can use math to reliably fingerprint these networks, they’re big, with hundreds of millions of IPs involved, and you can rotate them via an API call to clean ones. Zero of this traffic would be taken down by these strikes. We didn’t even see any perceptible change in internet traffic overall with this.

Replies (3)

@paraphrand@lemmy.world 2026-10-14 04:55

I’ve blocked my cameras and TV from reaching the wider web. Is there a tool I can use to monitor my home network for this sort of thing?

Open ##5178938
@anzo@programming.dev 2026-10-14 05:27

A proxy only routes traffic while the cpu cycles are happening elsewhere, allegedly, the data center that went offline. Your argument only makes sense if those proxies are more than just routing network packets but also hosting the actual code of those bots. Oh, and you’d also need to assume there’s no c&c, the bots should be autonomous. Else there’s the single point of failure. If there’s a c&c then they can all go offline with a strike.

Open ##5180789
@artyom@piefed.social 2026-10-14 07:09

tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all. I’m sure they just don’t care. The vast amount of modern “journalism” is just reposting someone else’s story. And if they get clicks, they don’t much particularly care if it’s accurate.

Open ##5190643