500,000 hits from search.msn.com, same IP, same search in 7 hours

[kahuna]

On Monday July 13, 2004 from 00:00 to about 8am I received the following over 500,000 times. Log files are deleted Saturdays so it probably started on the 12th.

67.****.xxx.77.client.THECOMPANY.net [13/Jun/2004:00:00:00 -0500] "GET somewebpage.shtml HTTP/1.1" 301 269 "http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?srch=105&FORM=AS5&q=generic+search+terms+formysite" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

This behavior continued into Wednesday this week but with slightly different 11+ variations of the IP and search terms for the referer of the above from G-oogle, and a couple of other search engines.

All the IPs belong to the same company (large mid Atlantic company). I have contacted the company but doubt I will get anything out of them.

Has anybody seen this type of behavior before? and or what in the world is going on?

Thank you very much for your time on this issue.

[digitalv]

I think that's a new record :)

No idea what they could possibly be doing, maybe trying to spider your site with an unlimited number of re-trys configured? Who knows.

Just block their entire subnet and forget about them.