PeerFactor 404 crawler resurfacing?

Any idea who they are?

[dataguy]

Hit one of my sites 32,000 times last night. It was automatically blocked, but it sure is annoying.

Anyone have info on where it comes from?

[hanuman]

whats the IP?
whats the UA?

help us to help you

[dcrombie]

I've seen a couple of hits from them but nothing extreme:

ip address: 213.246.46.213 
method: HEAD 
user agent: PeerFactor 404 crawler

Tracked them back to this website: [peerfactor.info...]

;)

[keyplyr]

Tracked them back to this website: [peerfactor.info...]

Well that certainly clears things up ;)

[GaryK]

I had a visit from them yesterday. Took the same page hundreds of times before it was blocked.

User Agent:
PeerFactor Crawler

IP Address:
213.186.46.210

[kevinpate]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213\.
RewriteRule .* - [F]

note: this is absolutely a case of overkill and unadvisable IF there is other traffic traveling on the 213 expressway which interests you. However, if there isn't .... the above is an effective detour sign.

[GaryK]

Thanks Kevin but I use IIS. I achieve pretty much the same result using ISAPI_Rewrite. :)

[DanA]

The info about peerfactor is there, but in French :
[retspan.info...]
with a FAQ (Découvrez ici les réponses à toutes vos questions sur RetSpan!)
They pretend there that you may earn money by fighting against content piracy.
then there
[retspan.biz...]
I don't kwow what content they are analysing as the requests are HEAD only.

[GaryK]

Previously I'd only seen this crawler as Peer Factor. This past week I finally saw the user agent the rest of you mentioned, PeerFactor 404 crawler.

The new user agent did not read robots.txt and tried getting the same folder numerous times until it was banned.