MSNBot from APNIC?

Is this a spoofed user-agent?

[Kadence]

My web site is receiving hits from the following IP addresses, identifying themselves by useragent as "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)":

219.142.53.16
219.142.53.21
219.142.53.24
219.142.53.25
219.142.53.26

However according to ARIN this IP range is assigned to "Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)", not Microsoft.

Is this really MSNBot, or is this a spoofed user-agent?

[dataguy]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/3181993.htm [webmasterworld.com] by volatilegx - 7:15 pm on Dec. 8, 2006 (CDT -6)

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In the past 24 hours I've been getting crawled by something identifying itself as 'msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)' but coming from a few APNIC IP ranges. They are coming from 202.96.51.xx and 219.142.53.xx.

I have outright blocked them from my site but I would hate to have done this to a legitimate MSN crawler.

Any ideas?

[Mokita]

Is this really MSNBot, or is this a spoofed user-agent?

Sure looks spoofed to me. The 219.142.53.nn IP range belongs to CHINATELECOM-BJ, and has no reverse DNS.

ja-dns.bjtelecom.net. (an authoritative nameserver for 142.219.in-addr.arpa., which is in charge of the reverse DNS for 219.142.53.16)
says that there are no PTR records for 219.142.53.16.

It certainly doesn't belong to MSN. Plus, if you do a Spam check, it is flagged as being blocked.

[dnsstuff.com...]

Very similar story for 202.96.51.xx. IP range belongs to China Network Communications Group Corporation, also has no reverse DNS, and also is flagged as being blocked by spam companies:
[dnsstuff.com...]

I have large swathes of Chinese IP ranges blocked, as nothing of any value comes from there for any of our sites. YMMV.

[volatilegx]

Just so ya'll know, Microsoft does spider out of China. I've seen IP addresses from this range coming in as msnbot: 202.96.51.128 - 202.96.51.255

[dnsstuff.com...]

[thetrasher]

Microsft (China) Co.Ltd

O?!

[webmasterworld.com...]

"Now we can verify MSNbot":
[webmasterworld.com...]
Reverse DNS lookup for 202.96.51.150 fails.
Reverse DNS lookup for 219.142.53.16 fails, too.