Blocking Chinese Bots from your Shopify store

After realising that Bot traffic originating from China takes up significantly more hits to a store than normal traffic, we’re taken steps to try and block traffic to get analytics back in good order. Here are the CloudFlare rules we’ve gone with.

Block CN + Other Regions

Blocks all traffic that Cloudflare sees as coming from China according to GeoIP.

(ip.geoip.country in {"CN" "RU" "KP" "SY"})

Block China Unicom ASNs

AS 4134 is the “ChinaNet Backbone” (China Telecom).

ip.src.asnum in {4134}

Block China Unicom ASNs

These are several ASNs owned by China Unicom. For example, AS 4837 is a well-known Unicom backbone. Cybercrime Information Center. AS 133118 and other ASNs (136958, 134543, 135061) are also associated with Unicom.

ip.src.asnum in {4837, 133118, 134543, 135061, 136958}

Block China Mobile / CMCC ASNs

AS 9808 is commonly associated with China Mobile.

ip.src.asnum in {9808}

Challenge Suspicious / Low-Reputation Requests

Uses Cloudflare’s threat scoring + bot detection to challenge likely bot traffic. Good for reducing automated “dead” sessions.

cf.threat_score > 20 and cf.client.bot

Fingers crossed this give us some respite.