Blocking HTTP 404 traffic

1. Problem statement There are some bots which request lots of pages of my web-server, which do not exist. This post shows how these bots are blocked on the network level with iptables . Here is an example of excessive HTTP 404 errors: 34.165.43.146|04/Jun/2026:12:43:33 +0200|404|14589|GET /backup.zip HTTP/2.0|-|Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0…