obot is back and not being very nice...

..asking for tons of files not even there.

[pendanticist]

This bot was mentioned in an earlier thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I've recently been visited by obot and as a result of it's, uh, behavior have banned it.

It CAPITALIZED all my files causing massive 404 listings on my stats page.

It CAPITALIZED files that don't and never did exist causing massive 404 listings on my stats page.

And, it requested up to two files per second.

<added> Ooooopps! I coulda sworn I selected Search Engine Spider Identification. Could one of you move this for me while I go wake up? Thanks. </added>

Pendanticist.

[pendanticist]

And, it requested up to two files per second.

Back again today with a vengance trying to suck down 5 & 6 files per second, but to noooooo avail because it's been banned. :)

Pendanticist.

[jmccormac]

The capitalisation makes it sound like it is some kind of Windows bot. I've seen it here on my site but the only thing that it requested were images.

Regards...jmcc

[pendanticist]

The capitalisation makes it sound like it is some kind of Windows bot.

Windows bot? As in Windows NT 4.0?

- - [24/Jan/2003:21:05:55 -0800] "GET /Wildlife.html HTTP/1.1" 403 223 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0; obot)"

I've seen it here on my site but the only thing that it requested were images.

Certainly not the case with my domain.

Pendanticist.

[weesnich]

I suspect cobion to be behind obot. Cobion (formerly Only Solutions) is just another brand protection company located in Kassel/Germany. Googleing "obot" and "cobion" shows that in former times their spider could be resolved to gw-cobion.netcomnetz.de. Seems like today they dont want to draw much attention to their business. Cobion runs as well visoo.de (which is pretty useless).

btw: Cobion is one of the leading companies in Net-Censorship-Attempts (content based filtering) in the German state NRW, where Mr. Büssow wants local ISP's to block access to certain foreign sites.

I think there are more than enough reasons to ban them.

[wilderness]

weesnich
Many thanks for the heads up and the master Sherlock :)

Don

[jmccormac]

Windows bot? As in Windows NT 4.0?

Sometimes poorly written Windows bots will present a capitalised version of a filename rather than the proper case sensitive ones. I've seen this a few times on sites that I admin. Most well written bots can handle the case differences regardless of whether they are running on a Windows or *nix platform.

Regards...jmcc