alt Hacker NewsA more interesting question is, what exactly do the attackers gain from hitting read the docs? Most of their docs hosting is static/easily CDN cached. Unlike database bound sites, you would need a lot more traffic to overload pure/mostly static hosting. Maybe it's a malicious AI lab looking to deny their competitors training data? As far as infosec profiling goes, this is probably the oddest case I have heard of.
I am thinking it's probably an AI lab that misconfigured their data scraper (made it too agentic) and it ended up looking like a DDoS.
The new generation of scrapers are all agentic and self healing. (As an example see YC's https://parse.bot)
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> Most of their docs hosting is static/easily CDN cached
The article says
> and it purposefully attacked areas that bypassed caching
So that doesn't work. Also, it seems that they were trying to cause financial harm, not to take down the infrastructure but to make it costly for the org itself. That's smart.
Author here. This was not a misconfigured data scraper. We see those every week[1]. This attack wasn't scraping useful content. It was almost entirely 404s and 302s and pulled virtually zero real docs. It specifically looked for URLs not served by the CDN and when it found a pattern, did millions of variations of it. Whether built by an AI or not, it was designed to cause outages and financial damage from autoscaling. However, as others have suggested, we may have been a test run for a real target.
[1] https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse...