OTAPI

Bots Overload OT Commerce Store on OT Box, Spike Paid OTAPI Calls Mistaken for DDoS Attack

An online store running OT Commerce experienced CPU loads reaching 98-100% and a 6-7x increase in paid OTAPI calls over three days due to automated bot traffic rather than a traditional DDoS. The site owner had already deployed a paid anti-bot module on the VPS, yet behavioral bots continued to bypass protections and force expensive calls to the external OTAPI platform for product data from Taobao, Tmall, 1688 and other marketplaces. Traffic analysis after switching to the CRONARMOR WAF revealed that 41.9% of page requests were automated, with 99.3% of early-stage automation blocked before reaching the origin server. Only 0.5% were behavioral bots visible in analytics, while legitimate search crawlers accounted for 27,190 requests that were explicitly allowed. The WAF approach stopped requests at the reverse proxy layer, preventing PHP execution, database queries and OTAPI billing events on the origin. Post-deployment CPU dropped to single digits for most of the day, eliminating both performance issues and the anomalous rise in paid API usage.