How We Trapped 1.4 Million Bots and Hackers Using a Kubernetes Honeypot (And What They Taught Us)

How We Trapped 1.4 Million Bots and Hackers Using a Kubernetes Honeypot (And What They Taught Us) The Real Cost of Bot Traffic Nobody Talks About You've probably checked your analytics dashboard and wondered: "Who are all these visitors?" If you're running any kind of web service at scale, the answer is uncomfortable. Somewhere between 30-60% of your traffic isn't human. It's bots. Some are benign crawlers. Others are actively trying to break into your infrastructure. But here's the thing that kept me up at night: we were blocking them at the edge, which meant we were flying blind. Every bot we rate-limited just adjusted its tactics. Every IP we blacklisted was replaced by three more. We were treating symptoms while the disease evolved faster than our defenses. Then we asked a different question: What if we stopped trying to keep them out and instead invited them in? That question led to a 90-day experiment that changed how we think about security. We deployed Krawl, a deception honeyp