August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem

…but first, a quick digression about what likely started it.

Our stance on AI agents isn’t much of a secret. I recently added a new feature to The Cutting Room Floor : If you visit the site with a “Claude-code” user agent… it adds you to a Claude user ban list. Then, if you try and visit the site later, without Claude — maybe because you wanted to investigate the “ prompt injection ” page it received — you’re greeted with a special error page telling you to get out , featuring a pixelated Claude logo: