All posts tagged: cloudflare

US Takes Down Botnets Used in Record-Breaking Cyberattacks

US Takes Down Botnets Used in Record-Breaking Cyberattacks

The collection of millions of hacked computers known as Aisuru and Kimwolf have been used to launch some of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. Now United States law enforcement agencies have wiped both of them off the internet along with two of the other hordes of hijacked computers—known as botnets—in a single broad takedown. On Thursday, the US Department of Justice, working with the cybercrime-fighting agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, announced that it had dismantled four massive botnets in a single operation, removing the command-and-control servers used to commandeer the hacker-run armies of compromised devices known by the names JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf. Together, operators of the four botnets had amassed more than 3 million devices, the Justice Department said, and often sold access to those devices to other criminal hackers as well as using them to target victims with overwhelming floods of attack traffic to knock websites and internet services offline. Aisuru and Kimwolf, a distinct but Aisuru-related botnet, had together …

Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Online bot traffic will exceed human traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO says

Bots are taking over the web, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. In an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin this week, he said that with the speed at which artificial intelligence is growing, AI bot traffic will exceed the amount of human traffic that’s online by 2027. Prince explained that bots’ web usage has been increasing alongside the growth of generative AI technology because bots are capable of visiting far more sites to get answers for users’ chatbot queries. “If a human were doing a task — let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera — and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,” Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.” Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google’s web crawler …

OpenClaw Users Are Allegedly Bypassing Anti-Bot Systems

OpenClaw Users Are Allegedly Bypassing Anti-Bot Systems

In San Francisco, it feels like OpenClaw is everywhere. Even, potentially, some places it’s not designed to be. According to posts on social media, people appear to be using the viral AI tool to scrape websites and access information, even when those sites have taken explicit anti-bot measures. One of the ways they are allegedly doing this is through an open source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile. While Scrapling, which was built with Python, works with multiple types of AI agents, OpenClaw users appear to be particularly fond of the software. On Monday, viral posts promoting Scrapling as a tool for OpenClaw users started to spread on X. Since its release, Scrapling has been downloaded over 200,000 times. “No bot detection. No selector maintenance. No Cloudflare nightmares,” reads one viral post this week about the open source tool. “OpenClaw tells Scrapling what to extract. Scrapling handles the stealth.” Cloudflare is not enthused. The company already blocked previous versions of Scrapling, since users of the open source software …

Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going

Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going

The future never feels fully certain. But in this time of rapid, intense transformation—political, technological, cultural, scientific—it’s as difficult as it ever has been to get a sense of what’s around the next corner. Here at WIRED, we’re obsessed with what comes next. Our pursuit of the future most often takes the form of vigorously reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people helping define it. That’s also why we recently embraced a new tagline: For Future Reference. We’re focused on stories that don’t just explain what’s ahead, but help shape it. In that spirit, we recently interviewed a range of luminaries from the various worlds WIRED touches—and who participated in our recent Big Interview event in San Francisco—as well as students who have spent their whole lives inundated with technologies that seem increasingly likely to disrupt their lives and livelihoods. The main focus was unsurprisingly on artificial intelligence, but it extended to other areas of culture, tech, and politics. Think of it as a benchmark of how people think about the future today—and …