Blunt Banhammer blocks basic bots
The gist
Blogger Terence Eden said his B⁶ honeypot cut OpenBenches.org bot traffic by over 80%.
A critic warns the hidden-link trap can be abused against legitimate users.
How it unfolded
- Nov 4, 2026Eden said OpenBenches.org was serving over two terabytes a month and robots.txt wasn't cutting it; his "quick and dirty" B⁶ script dropped traffic from 200GB to about 60GB a day and blocked nearly 100 IP addresses that requested the hidden directory.
- Nov 5, 2026Eden said B⁶ had caught about 150 scrapers and cut roughly 75% of traffic, with bandwidth falling from 217GB to 41GB a day.
- Nov 9, 2026Eden published the blog post "Blunt Banhammer Blocks Basic Bots Ballistically," saying he cut bot traffic by over 80% with a simple trap; a daily.dev summary said the tool had blocked over 400 IP addresses and cut peak daily transfer from 216GB to around 25GB.
Key terms
- honeypot
- A decoy computer system or data set designed to attract, detect, and analyze unauthorized attackers.
- robots.txt
- A standard text file on a website that tells visiting web crawlers which parts they may or may not access.
- CSS
- A style sheet language used to specify the presentation and styling of documents written in markup languages like HTML.
Source: Wikipedia