I’m having a hard time blaming this entirely on Ai. We’re talking about a 30 year old site that has probably never had a proper redesign (front and back end). Of course it’s eventually going to be compromised.

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

I’m sure they know what they’re doing, making me very wrong, but bots probing for back doors is very common, and not at all anything to be concerned about. The attackers most likely don’t even care about the data, all they want is another site to spread malware or to join their botnet.

AI scrapers can be brutal though, and is very relevant.

This doesn’t say anything.

Why did the server crash? Who knows!

Did it crash because of ai scrapers? Maybe! It was definitely stressed by them.

Was the server hacked? No idea!

If it was hacked, was it an attempt to rig prediction markets? Sounds plausible!

This nebulous theorizing really is worrying me! I’m worried for the critical thinking capacity of every commenter. Sure, ai bot traffic is a problem, the entire internet is dealing with it, but its tenuous link to TheNumbers.com mystery is merely clickbait journalism without any sourcing.