Msnptc/1.0

What is this bot?

[delphian]

Any new information about what this bot is? I've been searching around for information but only have found posts about a year old, and no final conclusion from them.

[wilderness]

As is the tradition, Welcome to WebMaster World.

I have no information on the bots intent.

I thought I recalled it being related to media however, I could be mistaken.

Something that has been a useful tool for me in sighting scrapers is that I have some old files online with mixed case.
Most of these bogus scrapers read these files incorrectly.

I had two such incorrect reads from this bot in December.

Don

[bcolflesh]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[fahic]

*** Found 1290 pages between 15/Jun/2005:03:23:20 and 15/Jun/2005:23:58:55 of 65.54.158.104.1010 with platform MSNPTC/1.0

Loop on two pages: consumer home and consumer/college by unusual
platform: "MSNPTC/1.0" appears to be a poorly coded spider
that does not check robots.txt ... started looping around 06:41 AM
and continued through midnight at about one pair every two minutes.

Low traffic = no harm done. 65.54.158.104 is associated with Microsoft
but it is unlikely this is "official" in any sense. We also took hits
in lesser numbers from 65.54.158.100, 102, 105 and 131.107.0.83 (also
a Microsoft administered domain). During June (01-14) to date there
have only been 1949 hits from MSNPTC so most occurred on 06/14. They
continue into 06/15 but with no significant traffic. Never any referer.

About 1/4 in June had longer platform strings:
"MSNPTC/1.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; MyIE2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
(MyIE2 has transformed into the Maxthon browser.)

There were assorted
other pages during June, including 262 "404s" to /%09%09%09 (Hex 09 is the
ASCII tab character).

(Long time lurker)