Could this be a bot?

only hits homepage

[too much information]

I get at least two hits from this IP per day only to my homepage. Wierd thing is it identifies itself as MSIE 6 or Konqueror and is never refered. (or doesn't give a referer)

The IP is 64.156.198.68 which is from Level 3 Communications

The Agent is either:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.0-rc2; i686 Linux; 20020217)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312466)

The strangest thing is that it never goes anywhere but the homepage.

Has anyone seen this before?

[spud01]

The fact that browsers types are been listed in the visitors log it definetely means this is not a bot - in actual fact its some1 looking at your site.

[Dreamquick]

spud01,

It's trivial to fake user-agent strings (ie the part that which tells you what is accessing the site), so just because they tell you they are a browser doesn't always make it true.

If it doesn't behave like a browser (ie fetching CSS, fetching images, referral information etc) then there's a good chance its a crawler of some description.

The fact that its coming from Level 3 makes me wary also because they used to have quite a few "stealth bots" operating from their IP ranges, mostly to catch IP infringments, data capture for commercial resale etc.

- Tony

[too much information]

Dreamquick - what do you mean by IP infringements?

Also, what are the stealth bots looking for? I would think a stealth bot would be used to check for cloaking or some type of SE spaming, but why would it hit this one site every day, and only the home page.

Actually, I just thought of this. Don't know if it has anything to do with the IP infringements thing, but this site has two domain names that my hosting service set to point to the same site. (we needed a shorter domain name, easier to remember) So I'm not sure if it is hitting one domain or the other or both. I'll add that to my log and see what's going on.

[jdMorgan]

too_much_information,

With that IP address and those user-agents, it looks like another IP address from WebSense, previously seen
from 63.212.171.128-255 and 64.156.198.69, 74-78, and 80. Another pest-bot.

Jim

[Dreamquick]

IP infringements

As in intellectual property - ie are you using certain trademarks on your site in a way the copyright holder doesn't agree with? They gather this data and attempt to sell it to the copyright holders (doubtless for a whole lot of cash).

Then there's also the people that try to categorise your site for their own purposes (filtering, not to mention statistics and domain information) and then sell that data onto their clients or profit off it themselves.

Nicely summed up by jdMorgan as pest-bots.

- Tony

[wilderness]

Nicely summed up by jdMorgan as pest-bots.

To add to both Jim and Dreamquick, each webmaster decides what pests are allowed to pester ;) and which are to be denied.

Most folks are against the selling of data which is mined from/and using our resources and content, to third parties.
These bots can come in a variety of defintions. Plagarism, copyright infringement, link validator, site checkers, email harvesters and on and on.

In the end each webmaster must decide what is both crucial and beneficial to the goals of their websites.

Don