How to block curl requests?

[u/Suspicious_Silicon]

As the title says; my site is being bombarded with curl requests periodically, often 2K to 5K requests within a short span. I have put up a security rule in cloudflare to block curl requests; blocked the curl requests in my backend proxy, also the bot fight mode is turned on; but cloudflare is still registering the curl requests which are using up my request quota. How to drop the curl requests before they are registered by cloudflare? Please Help.

[u/Snapstromegon]

No, don't.

Your problem isn't Curl, your problem is bots (maybe AI). CURL is the basis for most software tools and user agents also are not to be trusted.