How to block unknown robots with mod_rewrite?

[longtone]

In cPanel there is a bot:

 

"Unknown robot (identified by 'bot*')"

 

and it's using 30% of of the bandwidth

 

I used mod_rewrite to block a number of known bad bots, and added the line:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^bot*

 

The bandwidth used by bot* did decrease (from about 40%), but it didn't stop

 

I'm not sure if I'm doing this right, whether * is a wildcard, and whether I should be putting bot.* instead of bot*, or if it's an actual asterisk and I should be escaping it.

 

Or maybe it's a whole range of different bots, all starting with 'bot'

 

Or is it possible (or desirable) to block all robots except Google, yahoo and MSN?

 

Any ideas?

 

[Daniel0]

You would do something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^bot* [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

 

The NC makes it case insensitive, the F means it'll give a 403 Forbidden response code and the L means the mod_rewrite chain stops on a successful match.

[longtone]

Thanks, I didn't know about the [NC], I'll give it a try