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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?

#21
post #8

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.

I'm not sure I can understand your advice.

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

#22
post #8

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.

I'm not sure I can understand your advice.

I think it works the following: Assuming the proxy has a different IP pointing to it's client, by inserting the IP it uses to connect to the original server into the HTTP reply (HTML/body code), it can be exposed to the OP. However, since he seems to have access logs and seems to understand the proxy requests pretty well, I wonder how it actually helps.

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

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're on Cloudflare and they're stripping JS wouldn't a JS challenge be appropriate? https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/c...

Pretty anti-user though

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

#24
post #8

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.

I'm not sure I can understand your advice.

Add a comment (or attribute or JS with a string literal) to your HTML that contains IP address of whoever requested the page. Obscure it somehow so it's not obvious that the HTML contains the IP address. Then check source code of the copy, and you'll see who requested it. You can then go after that IP.

BTW: if they're removing/replacing domain name of your site, try obscuring it with HTML entities. This may dodge simple find'n'replace.

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

#26
Don't block their IPs, but rather return them subtly wrong content that isn't broken at the first glance. Insert typos, replace important terms, inject nonsense technobabble, make URLs point to wrong pages, inject off-topic SEO-spammy keywords that search engines will see as the SEO spam they are.

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

#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 and look for that element and flag that ip OR flag the headers.

4. Buy proxy databases, and when any user requests your webpage, check if its a proxy.

5. Instead of banning them, return fake content (fake titles and fake images etc) if proxy is detected OR the ip is flagged.

6. Don't ban the flagged ip's. She/He's gonna find another one. Make them angry and their user's angry so they give up on you.

7. Maybe write some bad words to the user on random places in the HTML when you detect flagged ip's :D So the user's will leave the site and this will reduce the SEO point of the adversary. Will be downranked.

8. Enable image hotlinking protection. Increase the cost of proxying for them.

9. Use @document CSS to hide the stuff when the URL is different.

10. Send abuse mail request to the hosting site.

11. Send abuse mail request to the domain provider.

12. Look for the flagged IPs and try to find the proxy provider. If you find, send mail to them too.

Edit: More ideas sparkled in my mind when I was in toilet:

1. Create fake big css files (10MB etc). And repeatedly download that from the adversary's website. This should cost them too much money on proxies.

2. When you detect proxy, return too big fake HTML files (10GB) etc. That could crash their server if they load the HTML into the memory when parsing.

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

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're on Cloudflare and they're stripping JS wouldn't a JS challenge be appropriate? https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/get-started/c...

Pretty anti-user though

Because it requires JS? How about this then...

    a[href*= "sukuns.us.to"] {
     display:none; 
    }
Then use SRI to enforce that CSS.

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

#29
Look at your traffic logs and see if you can't fingerprint the scraper. Should be relatively easy since they're mirroring your entire site.

Then instead of blocking the fingerprint, poison the data. Introduce errors that are hard to detect. Maybe corrupt the URLs, or use the incorrect description or category. Be creative, but make it kind of shit.

It's easy to work around blocks. Working around poisoned data is much harder.

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

#30
What about steganography?

If you change subtle details about spelling, spacing, formatting, etc by the source IP, then you can look at one of their pages and figure out which IP it was scraped from.

Then, just add goatse to all pages requested by that IP. Alternatively, replace every other sentence with GPT-generated nonsense.

EDIT: it should be quite easy to use JS to fingerprint the scraper. The downside is that you will also block all NoScript users.

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