AI Bot Cosplay
Blog post from Fastly
Fastly observed approximately 6.3 million requests in one day from nearly 10,200 IP addresses impersonating recognized AI crawlers while scanning websites for exposed sensitive files such as .env configurations, Git metadata, credentials, API keys, and tokens. Although most AI bot traffic is legitimate and can be verified by matching source IPs to vendor-published ranges, attackers exploit sites that trust User-Agent strings alone to obtain relaxed access or evade detection. A dominant campaign involving about 1,600 IP addresses accounted for 94% of the activity, largely originating from one cloud provider, rotating through 12 AI bot identities and using a shared 96-file wordlist across more than 100,000 sites. Environment files were the primary target, with attackers also attempting traversal and development-server path variants. Fastly recommends blocking requests that claim to be known AI bots but fail source verification when they seek confidential files, as this approach remains effective despite changes to IP addresses or User-Agent details.
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