Answer
Recently, there has been an increased volume of bot/crawler automated traffic. These high volume requests are typically coming from a broad range of international IP's in smaller per-call volume (distributed botnets) as opposed to a finite range of IP's hitting endpoints in extreme volume (concentrated botnets). Due to the distributed pattern, these are both more difficult to diagnose and prevent, as they're often not hitting in sufficient volume to appear as aberrant traffic, whereas, historically concentrated botnets are more obvious and easily addressed by granular blocking.
Due to this, the current methodology employed by our teams to mitigate the behavior is a geofence block. A geofence block entails restricting traffic outside of the geographic region, such as continental US and Canada for North American based library systems, which prevents the vast majority of the bot and crawler traffic from impacting customer functionality. This impacts access to library resources for patrons traveling outside of their library region and is intended as a short term solution only.
In the long-term, the Cloud team has been working to deploy and configure better filtering and adaptive blocking via Cloudflare Magic Transit with a current prospective date Q4 2026.
For On Premise Customers, our recommendation is to monitor inbound traffic to the perimeter firewall and similarly restrict by region, or look to deploy traffic filtering based on patterns or volume you may observe.
If either Hosted or On Premise customers suspect you’re dealing with bot/automated traffic related issues, please submit a case to Support and our team will review and either apply remedial action or provide guidance on how your library may be able to do so.
