Microsoft URL Control

[Thez]

Yesterday I got multiple hits from some IP 70.97.97.1 that had the user-agent "Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8169". It crawled a single page in my site 80,000 times, until it stopped.

I highly doubt his is affiliated with M$, what is it exactly?

Hopefully posted to the correct forum :)

[Dijkgraaf]

Microsoft URL Control is a code library from Microsoft that like any code libraries that can be used to build usefull tools, but also open to abuse.
It is know to be used by some email harvesting bots for purposes of spamming.

[keyplyr]

Mostly I see it used for downloading copies of webpages/files to the user's local machine, sometimes in combination with MS Office or MS Frontpage. I've banned it for years.