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BOTSTOPPER FROM TECHAROABOUT

About

BotStopper is made by Techaro, the team behind Anubis, the open source proof-of-work bot protection tool that many websites run behind. BotStopper is the commercial patchset for Anubis: everything upstream does applies, plus the additions organizations need.

What BotStopper does

BotStopper sits in front of your site and evaluates every request against a policy file. Rules match requests with regular expressions or CEL (Common Expression Language) filters over request data such as headers, and BotStopper adds its own CEL variables like headlessScore. Rules can allow, deny, challenge, or add weight to a request, and thresholds turn that weight into progressively stricter responses.

On top of upstream Anubis, BotStopper currently adds:

  • Headless browser detection: a WebAssembly detector that runs alongside the challenge and reports automation signals. Hard signals fail the challenge outright, and session scores and per-network counts feed back into CEL policy expressions. Results are exported as Prometheus metrics.
  • The Soteria challenge: an obfuscated virtual machine challenge that synthesizes programs at runtime and solves four of them at once with WASM SIMD, with reduced difficulty for phones.
  • Customization: overlay folders for your own CSS, fonts, and images, plus custom message titles, so the challenge page carries your brand instead of ours.
  • Deployment packaging: Docker and Podman images, Kubernetes support, and binary packages with templated systemd units for running many instances per host.
  • Proxy and service upgrades: per-hostname TLS connection pools and per-instance runtime directories.

The defaults come from years of fighting unwanted automated traffic without making websites hostile to humans: challenges that do the job without drama, and detection that runs quietly in the background.

Questions? Contact us.