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Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

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Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could do this without effecting normal traffic depending on uniqueness of ip doing the scraping. Love the idea.

I think you missed the point - if people show up at $PROXY expect nice stuff but see junk, then they won't move over to $REAL and instead blame $REAL. E.g. you'd like some way to redirect people from $PROXY site to $REAL site, and disgusting content on $PROXY won't do that - it'll reflect poorly on $REAL

If you can identify the crawler - you can provide 'dynamic' content for that specific user context.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#194
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about something like... body[href*= " "] { background-image: url("http://goatse..."); } Ala: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011

We're trying to punish the people running the proxy mirror, not the users who stumble upon them just trying to use the site

You could look at it as trying to get them blocked by search engines. Can you detect when they're proxying a search bot as opposed to a user? As for punish, you don't have to make it eye-bleach, just enough to make it firmly NSFW so nobody can get any business value from it, or even use it safely at work.

A little soft NSFW would also greatly accelerate them being added to a block list, especially if you were to submit their site to the blocklists as soon as you started including it. You can include literally anything that won't get you arrested. Terrorist manifestos, the anarchists cookbook, insane hentai porn... Use all those block categories - gore/extreme, terrorist, adult, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#195
post #41
post #27

1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script. 2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains. 3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website…

I like how you think. These are all great ideas! Reminds me of a time some real estate website hotlinked a ton of images from my website. After I asked them to stop and they ignored me I added an nginx rewrite rule to send them a bunch of pictures of houses that were on fire. For some reason they stopped using my website as their image host after that.

#5 and #6 are key. Don't try to block them directly, just get them delisted. When you've worked out a way to identify which requests belong to the scammer, feed them content that the search engines and their ad partners will penalize them for.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#196
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the OP mentioned, JS is stripped and URLs are being written, so I doubt either of those approaches will work.

Maybe an html redirect tag that bounces through a tertiary domain before redirecting to your real one? If they noticed you were doing it they could mitigate it, but they might deem it too much effort and just go away. You might also start with the hypothesis that they're using regex for JS removal and try various script injection tricks...

If they're already stripping JS, I can't imagine it would be a lot of work to also remove the redirect.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#197
Fail2ban might help

Even with IP rotation, a proxy website would probably generate more traffic than normal from these few IPs, tweak fail2ban vars so you to make it less likely to trigger on false positives (larger number of requests / larger amount of time) but block the violating IPs for long period, few days for example.

I hope it helps

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#198
post #27

1. Create fake url endpoint. And go to that endpoint in the adversary's website, when your server gets request, flag the ip. Do this nonstop with a script. 2. Create fake html elements and put unique strings inside. And you can search that string in search engines for finding similar fake sites on different domains. 3. Create fake html element and put all request details in encrypted format. Visit adversary's website…

Fake 10GB html can be a zip bomb?
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