21CTO

May 3, 2025 · Information Security

How I Stopped Bot Floods with a Tiny Zip Bomb on a $6 Server

A $6 DigitalOcean server handling millions of requests survived a Hacker News surge by visualizing traffic, distinguishing bots from real users, and deploying tiny gzip‑compressed zip bombs that explode malicious crawlers' memory, demonstrating low‑cost operations and security tactics for resilient web services.