Bots, Scrapers, and Proxies: Defending Drupal Sites in an Automated Internet
Time: Wednesday 13th May 10:10-10:40
Room: Loft
Track: Web Tools & Complementary Technologies
Automated traffic on the internet has evolved well beyond simple crawlers and brute-force attacks. Modern bots use headless browsers, residential proxy networks, and AI-driven scraping that deliberately mimic real users, making traditional IP blocking and rate limiting increasingly ineffective.
This session explores how Drupal teams can respond to this new reality using pragmatic, layered defences. In addition to Drupal modules such as Perimeter, CrowdSec, AbuseIPDB, and Facet Bot Blocker, the talk demonstrates how to place Anubis in front of a Drupal site to selectively protect high-cost or high-risk endpoints such as forms, search, pagination, and authenticated flows.
Rather than attempting to block all bots, this talk focuses on reducing abuse where it hurts most, understanding trade-offs, and integrating modern bot controls without breaking accessibility, SEO, or legitimate users.
This session explores how Drupal teams can respond to this new reality using pragmatic, layered defences. In addition to Drupal modules such as Perimeter, CrowdSec, AbuseIPDB, and Facet Bot Blocker, the talk demonstrates how to place Anubis in front of a Drupal site to selectively protect high-cost or high-risk endpoints such as forms, search, pagination, and authenticated flows.
Rather than attempting to block all bots, this talk focuses on reducing abuse where it hurts most, understanding trade-offs, and integrating modern bot controls without breaking accessibility, SEO, or legitimate users.
Speakers
Sean Hamlin
Passionate about making awesome solutions to solve complex business problems. Based primarily in Tauranga, and working with some of amazee.io's most strategic customers in region and globally.