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

#1

Post by stanislavb » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:00 AM UTC

Hi Hacker News community,

I'm trying to deal with a very interesting (to me) case. Someone is proxy-mirroring all content of my website under a different domain name.

- Original: https://www.saashub.com

- Abuser/Proxy-mirror: https://sukuns.us.to

My ideas of resolution:

1) Block them by IP - That doesn't work as they are rotating the IP from which the request is coming.

2) Block them by User Agent - They are duplicating the user-agent of the person making the request to sukuns.us.to

3) Add some JavaScript to redirect to the original domain-name - They are stripping all JS.

4) Use absolute URLs everywhere - they are rewriting everything www.saashub.com to their domain name.

i.e. I'm out of ideas. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

p.s. what is more, Bing is indexing all of SaaSHub's content under sukuns.us.to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I've reported a copyright infringement, but I have a feeling that it could take ages to get resolved.

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

#2

Post by satya71 » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:05 AM UTC

We had a similar situation, though it was just a snapshot. We found out they were hosting using S3, and filed a DMCA request with AWS. It was taken down and hasn’t returned.

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

#3

Post by simonz05 » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:09 AM UTC

Another option would be to use a service like Cloudflare, which offers protections against scraping and other malicious behavior. This can help prevent the proxy-mirror site from being able to access your site's content.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discove...

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

#4

Post by stanislavb » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:11 AM UTC

simonz05 wrote: post #3

Another option would be to use a service like Cloudflare, which offers protections against scraping and other malicious behavior. This can help prevent the proxy-mirror site from being able to access your site's content. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discove...

I have Cloudflare at the front already. The issue is that they are not actively scraping the content but rather mirroring it on demand.

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

#5

Post by trinovantes » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:23 AM UTC

They are probably using some public cloud service so simply banning all IPs from cloud ASNs [1] will usually be enough. Downside is you're also banning any users using VPNs

[1] https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list

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

#6

Post by stanislavb » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:27 AM UTC

trinovantes wrote: post #5

They are probably using some public cloud service so simply banning all IPs from cloud ASNs [1] will usually be enough. Downside is you're also banning any users using VPNs [1] https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list

Thanks, that seems like something I could work on if I can't find a better solution. Cheers.

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

#7

Post by maybe_pablo » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:31 AM UTC

stanislavb wrote: post #4

simonz05 wrote: post #3

Another option would be to use a service like Cloudflare, which offers protections against scraping and other malicious behavior. This can help prevent the proxy-mirror site from being able to access your site's content. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discove...

I have Cloudflare at the front already. The issue is that they are not actively scraping the content but rather mirroring it on demand.

Just an idea but maybe you could cause big loads on their servers by requesting in parallel a large amount of urls where you actively serve a gzipped massive html file that is full of links to your website.

EDIT: or building up on what user zhouyisu says above you can generate your perfect match IP blacklist by calling urls via the abusing site that automatically puts any caller into the blacklist.

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

#8

Post by sdrinf » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:43 AM UTC

If the host (DediPath) is not respecting DMCA notices, one other thing you can do is adding the requester's IP address to every page, eg as a div class. If the responses are live proxied, this will surface the cloner's front-facing IP address, and you can block that (and their ASN) specifically.

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

#9

Post by fragmede » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:44 AM UTC

stanislavb wrote: post #4

simonz05 wrote: post #3

Another option would be to use a service like Cloudflare, which offers protections against scraping and other malicious behavior. This can help prevent the proxy-mirror site from being able to access your site's content. https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-scrapeshield-discove...

I have Cloudflare at the front already. The issue is that they are not actively scraping the content but rather mirroring it on demand.

Then where they're coming from should be exceedingly visible in logs (via splunk or whatever), so deny those requests.

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

#10

Post by zhouyisu » Mon, Dec 12, 2022, 8:58 AM UTC

Maybe some logic honeypot would be good, such as a infinite content paging list with some random trigger hidden at pages with non-sense titles. When one IP hits these triggers, it is automatically banned.

Bots will trigger it by walking through all pages, but real human would not click in since the paging is non-sense and titles are non-sense.