otuatail Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 Hi guys I have recently become aware of a strange user agent on my system and wondered if anyone knew anything about it. The ips range from 208.80.193.xxx to 208.80.194.xxx and have info like Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; {AFA3C341-FA12-0D24-5B56-590FD62901DC}) is this some bot as the information is changing all the time. Desmond. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 Could be. User agents can be masked. You would never know if it was a bot unless the bot writer set the agent name like google do (googlebot). I would say that a clever bot writer will use a valid browser agent. From your logs you should be able to see the pages accessed. If it looks suspicious then block the IP addresses. As you say there are a range then it is likely that they are a set of proxy addresses. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
otuatail Posted March 13, 2009 Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 Yesd Thanks. They only go to the home page ike a bot would do, so use as far as I am concernd. Des. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 What is your website URL? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
otuatail Posted March 13, 2009 Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 www.des-otoole.co.uk But that wouldn't help Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 I wouldn't say you have a bot problem on the index page of that website as there are no resources to exploit. However your contact form is wide open to spam! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
otuatail Posted March 13, 2009 Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 Thanks for that. Not sure how I can get around spam on the contact page. My email address would not be visible as it is in PHP. Desmond. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JonnoTheDev Posted March 13, 2009 Share Posted March 13, 2009 Stick a captcha on it http://recaptcha.net/ Nothing to do with your email address. A spammer will just post loads of spam messages into the contact form. You will end up with tons of garbage in your inbox. Also if your form sends an outbound email to the address entered in the email field on the form then this is spam heaven. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
otuatail Posted March 13, 2009 Author Share Posted March 13, 2009 Good idea. Always wondered how to do somthing like this. Thanks alot. Desmond. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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