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Comment by xorglorb | Hacker News Reader

Even though not all of us like Microsoft, you still shouldn't do this. The best way to handle this is to send random data at 10b/s and slow down the bots.

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It'd be interesting to keep a list of the bots, and randomly redirect the traffic back at them. My first thought was that this would mess up people who unknowingly have a bot on their computer, but then I realized this might actually make them look into getting their computer fixed.

Am I missing something here, or is this actually a decent idea?

I suppose you could always redirect to 127.0.0.1. Maybe even go for a port that's likely to be open on a statistically random compromised system, like 135 (Windows DCOM, can't close it to localhost without breaking like half the system).

Edit: I just tried this in IE on my Win box; the connection even stayed open for a good long time! Firefox blocked it, though, which is probably good.

I doubt these bots can handle the redirect request. Its js and I don't see why someone would code to support it. Maybe someone better informed than me can say whether curl or wget respect redirect by default.

JS? 300 http codes cause a redirection without any JS whatsoever.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

There is an extension to iptables that adds a TARPIT target

http://xtables-addons.sourceforge.net/

Better would be to redirect to a third party service that offers that.

Are there any? I think that's weekend-project sized and donations could support it.

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