I use zip bombs to protect my server

Summary

The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bots crawling content to power LLMs. But then there are the malicious bots. These are from spammers, content scrapers or hackers. At my old employer, a bot discovered a wordpress vulnerability and inserted a malicious script into our server. It then turned the machine into a botnet used for DDOS. One of my first websites was yanked off of Google search entirely due to bots generating spam. At some point, I had to find a way to protect myself from these bots. That's when I started using zip bombs. A zip bomb is a relatively small compressed file that can expand into a very large file that can overwhelm a machine. A feature that was developed early on the web was compression with gzip. The Internet being slow and information being dense, the idea was to compress data as small as possible before transmitting it through the wire. So an 50 KB HTML file, composed of text, can be compressed to 10K, thus saving you 40KB in transmission. On dial up Internet, this meant downloading the page in 3 seconds instead of 12 seconds. This same compression can be used to serve CSS, Javascript, or even images. Gzip is fast, simple and drastically improves the browsing experience. When a browser makes a web request, it includes the headers that signals the target server that it can support compression. And if the server also supports it, it will return a compressed version of the expected data. Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Bots that crawl the web also support this feature. Especially since their job is to ingest data from all over the web, they maximize their bandwidth by using compression. And we can take full advantage of this feature. On this blog, I often get bots that scan for security vulnerabilities, which I ignore for the most part. But when I detect that they are either trying to i...