You can also use Varnish ACLs to block the EC2 IP addresses. And if they have a really obvious user-agent you could block that using Varnish: http://omninoggin

You can also use Varnish ACLs to block the EC2 IP addresses. And if they have a really obvious user-agent you could block that using Varnish: http://omninoggin.com/web-development/block-unwanted-spam-bots-using-varnish-vcl/ http://omninoggin.com/web-development/block-unwanted-spam-bo... And if you're not afraid of using Varnish's VCL InlineC stuff, then you could add rate limiting to Varnish: http://drcarter.info/2010/04/how-fighting-against-scraping-using-varnish-vcl-inline-c-memcached/ http://drcarter.info/2010/04/how-fighting-against-scraping-u... Basically... Varnish has become my Swiss army tool for rejecting crap traffic (and caching good traffic obviously).