"Suddenly, the crawlers were coming from millions of random residential or mobile IPs, all pretending to be random modern browsers. An IP like that would make 4-5 requests and then never show up in the logs again. There was no point in banning them, because by the time you figured out that they were bots, they were already done with you. You just needlessly ballooned your firewall ruleset by adding IPs that would never be back.

They descended like swarms of locust, hit hard and fast until the system fell over and then moved on to the next target until you recovered. Then, they returned. Rinse. Repeat.

They still do that — welcome to the wonderful world of “proxy SDK monetization.” It’s big business, and your TV is probably doing it."