I’ve been running several webservers behind custom domains for a while now (plateyplatey.com, textadventurer.tk, and this site) and it never ceases to amaze me how cheeky bots are getting.

For example, certbot recently started complaining that textadventurer.tk’s TLS certificate is about to expire. That shouldn’t happen because there’s a nightly cronjob for certbot renew.

On SSHing into the server I found an immediate problem: the disk was full. Why? Because some bot, listed as from contabotserver.net decided to spam the server with >10 million requests one afternoon and fill the HTTP logs. Great. Looks like I’m finally going to implement some log compression+rotation.

Then there’s the almost hourly attempts to find a PHPMyAdmin panel on my sites. That one always surprised me: surely only a small percentage of PHP sites are misconfigured that badly? Lets look at the stats:

Even if 1 % of them are misconfigured, we’re doomed.