Library IT vs. the AI bots – June 9, 2025
Left to right: David Romani, Tim Shearer and Jason Casden worked with the Library’s IT team and campus colleagues to thwart bots attacking the online library catalog.An unprecedented attack tests the ingenuity of the University Libraries’ IT department and reveals a dark side of artificial intelligence.
by Judy Panitch
The first sign of something amiss was a cry for help.
“I’m getting reports from staff of a catalog error: ‘This website is under heavy load (queue full).’ I saw it myself once. Seems to be intermittent.”
Translation: On Dec. 2, 2024, the University Libraries’ online catalog was receiving so much traffic that it was periodically shutting out students, faculty and staff, including the head of User Experience. Could the Library’s IT experts take action?
Heavy use of the catalog during finals week is typical as students look up books and articles for term papers and projects. This was different.
“It was just a boatload of traffic, more than we had any reasonable expectation of getting,” recalls David Romani, a system administrator and the Library’s security liaison. Normal heavy use might involve 100 simultaneous searches. Now, internal logs showed 500 or more searches at a time, overloading the system and triggering glitches.
In many computer attacks, related internet (IP) addresses or a single internet service provider (ISP) might behave suspiciously. Administrators stop the attack by blocking those computers. The Library permanently bans more than 4 million IP addresses—most of them overseas—because of prior bad behavior. The University blocks millions more at the campus level.
What Romani found surprised him. The searches were coming from addresses spread broadly across the United States using reputable ISPs such as AT&T, Spectrum and Verizon. Each interaction looked exactly like something that happens thousands of times a day at a research library like Carolina’s.
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