I got into the self-hosting scene this year when I wanted to start up my own website run on old recycled thinkpad. A lot of time was spent learning about ufw, reverse proxies, header security hardening, fail2ban.
Despite all that I still had a problem with bots knocking on my ports spamming my logs. I tried some hackery getting fail2ban to read caddy logs but that didnt work for me. I nearly considered giving up and going with cloudflare like half the internet does. But my stubbornness for open source self hosting and the recent cloudflare outages this year have encouraged trying alternatives.
Coinciding with that has been an increase in exposure to seeing this thing in the places I frequent like codeberg. This is Anubis, a proxy type firewall that forces the browser client to do a proof-of-work security check and some other nice clever things to stop bots from knocking. I got interested and started thinking about beefing up security.
I’m here to tell you to try it if you have a public facing site and want to break away from cloudflare It was VERY easy to install and configure with caddyfile on a debian distro with systemctl. In an hour its filtered multiple bots and so far it seems the knocks have slowed down.
My botspam woes have seemingly been seriously mitigated if not completely eradicated. I’m very happy with tonights little security upgrade project that took no more than an hour of my time to install and read through documentation. Current chain is caddy reverse proxy -> points to Anubis -> points to services
Good place to start for install is here
I don’t know if “anything”. But surely people overestimate its capabilities.
It’s only a PoW challenge. Any bot can execute a PoW challenge. For a smal to medium number of bots the energy difference it’s negligible.
Anubis it’s useful when millions of bots would want to attack a site. Then the energy difference of the PoW (specially because Anubis increase the challenge if there’s a big number of petitions) can be enough to make the attacker desist, or maybe it’s not enough, but at least then it’s doing something.
I see more useful against DDOS than AI scrapping. And only if the service being DDOS is more heavy than Anubis itself, if not you can get DDOS via anubis petitions. For AI scrapping I don’t see the point, you don’t need millions of bots to scrape a site unless you are talking about a massively big site.