bot flood for ~ directories

[ChefGroovy]

I was looking over my log files earlier and in the 404 error section it seems like every few days some yay-hoo does hundreds of checks for for like

/~aardvark
/~aadam
/~blah blah
....
/~zzzzt

Always in middle of night, different IP. Maybe not even same guy.

I assume he's fishing for customer directories?

Anyways, I was wondering if there was any way in .htaccess to make ANY request for a "~" directory, since I don't have any, goto a special page

Thanks
Dan

[jdMorgan]

The sequence of URL_paths indicates a simple dictionary attack for user directories on a server using mod_userdir [httpd.apache.org].

What is the server response code for requests of /~ directories? Any 200-OK response may indicate that your server has mod_userdir enabled, and this might affect the solution.

If not, a simple mod_rewrite [httpd.apache.org] rule (assuming you already have other working rules) would likely take care of this problem:

RewriteRule ^~[a-z] - [F]

Jim