View Articles

In the breakneck race to hoover up data, AI models are unleashing armies of bots that crawl the web nonstop—often ignoring rules like robots.txt. The result? Siphoned bandwidth, strained servers, and pages that slow to a crawl or go offline—an abnormal, excessive load that hurts publishers, businesses, and users alike. As The Register notes, more and more voices are calling out bots that send no traffic back yet rack up infrastructure costs and leave teams overwhelmed.

At OpenSource Solutions, we take a clear, measurable approach. We continuously analyze traffic logs to spot overconsumption, correlate signals across multiple servers to tell trustworthy crawlers (search engines) from aggressive AI scrapers, and roll out proactive defenses—quotas, rate limiting, IP allowlists, bot traps, even GeoIP filtering—to protect performance without blocking the indexing that’s essential for SEO. Let’s break it down.

Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are among the most disruptive cybersecurity threats faced by businesses and governments alike. These attacks involve overwhelming a system with excessive traffic to render it inaccessible, thereby causing significant service disruptions. While DoS attacks are typically launched from a single source, DDoS attacks leverage a multitude of sources, making them much more difficult to mitigate.

Recent trends indicate a surge in such attacks, with a notable example being the 2023 HTTP/2 protocol exploit that saw major tech giants like Google and Amazon fend off record-breaking levels of traffic.

This article explores these threats and outlines key strategies for mitigating risks, such as the use of DDoS protection services, network security protocols, secure authentication methods, proactive monitoring, and more. By implementing these strategies, businesses can significantly reduce their vulnerability to such attacks and safeguard critical infrastructure.