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Re: Hundreds of requests for robots.txt from Firefox 1.5.01

  • Subject: Re: Hundreds of requests for robots.txt from Firefox 1.5.01
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:03:18 +0000
  • Newsgroups: alt.www.webmaster
  • Organization: schestowitz.com / MCC / Manchester University
  • References: <46jf3oFb40caU1@individual.net> <Xns977860CF14265allisthemooseisloose@216.168.3.64> <46jg3pFbhgqmU1@individual.net> <Xns977862C9048CBallisthemooseisloose@216.168.3.64>
  • Reply-to: newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • User-agent: KNode/0.7.2
__/ [ Allis ] on Tuesday 28 February 2006 17:42 \__

> Knowing the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show, Brian
> Wakem has proclaimed :
> 
>> Allis wrote:
>> 
>>> Knowing the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show,
>>> Brian Wakem has proclaimed :
>>> 
>>>> Have been getting lots of requests for robots.txt these last few
>>>> days.
>>>> 
>>>> Big batches of them (100 at a time) from multiple IPs, all from
>>>> Firefox 1.5.0.1
>>>> 
>>>> Example:
>>>> 
>>>> 62.252.224.18 - - [28/Feb/2006:17:06:52 +0000] "GET /robots.txt
>>>> HTTP/1.1" 404 285 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1;
>>>> en-GB; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1"
>>>> "host:213.228.193.51"
>>>> 
>>>> and so on for another 90 or so lines.
>>>> 
>>>> Anyone else seen this?  A bug in FF 1.5.0.1?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=62.252.224.18&cache=off
>> 
>> 
>> As I said ...from multiple IPs.
>> 
>> 
> 
> Read that ;)
> Thought I'd send the info in case the IP's are owned by the same
> block/co.
> 
> My mistake.
> Not the first, won't be the last.

The sarcastic answer: somebody is preparing for an 'ethical' DDOS attack.

The more plausible answer: someone is surveying sites to studying if they
serve different robots directives to differnet addresses. I can recall
Web-wide waves that 'tickled' sites for 404's responses.

Best wishes,

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      | "World ends in five minutes - please log out"
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