<ul><li>Bots are a common presence on the internet, some helpful like search engine crawlers and others malicious scraping data, spamming forms, or brute-forcing login pages.</li><li>Nginx can be used to detect and stop malicious bots without needing an expensive SaaS WAF, by analyzing logs for patterns, identifying suspicious behavior, blocking with Nginx configurations, and utilizing tools like Fail2Ban for automatic IP bans.</li><li>Key steps include starting with logs to understand the activity, creating filters to block obvious bot behavior, implementing rate limits for abusive IPs, using tools like Fail2Ban for automated bans, and exploring advanced solutions like CrowdSec, ModSecurity, and OpenResty for smarter bots.</li><li>An unconventional approach involves serving zip bombs to deter bots, where a compressed file expands to a large size when decompressed, causing issues for bots attempting to access it.</li></ul>

Killing Bots at the Gate: Detecting Malicious Crawlers with Nginx

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