Mysterious Spider

[tesla]

Over the last few days I have been spidered heavily by:

wdsl-209-204-176-200.sonic.net - 66.54.140.2 80

Any Idea who this is?

(I have sent a message to the technical admin person as listed in the who-is for 209.204.176.200 )

Thanks,

[Dreamquick]

What user-agent is associated with the requests?

-Tony

[tesla]

Not sure what you mean. Here is an entire log entry:

2002-09-16 15:10:17 wdsl-209-204-176-200.sonic.net - 66.54.140.2 80 GET /products/Impact/Wildlife/im_SawWhetOwl.asp - 200 0 378 Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0)

[mack]

Looks like a browser to me?

[Dreamquick]

As Mack points out the UA "Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+6.0;+Windows+NT+5.0)" is definetely one which belongs to a browser.

If you are really sure your site is being spidered by this user then it looks like they are trying to do it stealth-ily - faking a user-agent is an easy thing to do, detecting a fake user-agent is a whole heap harder.

<added type="idea">
Given what your site does I'd say someone with only a fraction of a clue has figured out that they might be able to get the images and has gotten hold of a download program.

Their first step was the copy their own browsers user-agent (or use a fake one that came with the program so that you might not notice their tricks or at least would have a harder time spotting them.
</added>

p.s. Nice owl :)

- Tony