Internet Explore 5.x -

**mumble mumble** hyperactive chinese bot **mumble mumble**

[Dreamquick]

Does anyone know anything about a bot with the UA "Internet Explore 5.x"?

I've seen the "IE 5.5 Compatible Browser" before now but not this variety - it appeared, grabbed 60 pages in under a minute and then went away - as the meta-description mentioned it also came from a Chinese ip-addr.

Also it seemed to understand enough about cookies to be able to handle my site's session cookie correctly - which is strange given how dumb most spam bots are...

Anyone know if this UA belongs to a specific program already on the market?

p.s.
I've tried the site search but it doesn't appear to understand that if I put quotes around the two words that it's supposed to mean that I want a phrase search!

[JamesR]

maybe you could just ban by IP? Internet Explore does not ring a bell...

[Dreamquick]

Banning by IP does have its appeals although I will need to have a think about some things first - mostly if it is worth using just one big deny or adding them as and when I see the need for them.

[HandwovenRug]

Internet Explore 5.x was discussed before:
[webmasterworld.com ]

[jdMorgan]

Dreamquick,

Just ban than one by UA - "Internet Explore" - Note missing "r" - It's not
"Internet Explorer". And "5.x" - Yeah, right - Must be a new MS versioning
method! You won't lose any honest traffic by banning it.

I use:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Internet\ Explore\ 5\.x [NC,OR]

in .htaccess to detect this one for a redirect 403.

Make sure you've blocked larbin and Indy Library too - these are also very
active and popular.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Indy.Library [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} larbin [NC,OR]

Sorry you got hit!

(Try searching WebmasterWorld for spambots, bad bots, etc. to turn up
many lists of nasty UAs.)

Jim

[Dreamquick]

Thanks for all that guys - I already had UA blocks in place so the only e-mail addresses it got were messages telling it not to try to harvest email along with a fake address.

I dumped the logs into a SQL db last night and checked out the impact of blocking access from china - the effect on real traffic was minimal so that's probably the way I'll go.

Sadly it's not on apache so blocking wont be as neat as modifying .htaccess :(, more likely I'll end up tweaking a few settings inside IIS!