Alexa.com Bot - ai archiver

What is this?

[ginar]

I am seeing this repeatedly over the last week or so in the error file log. Does anyone know what is going on? All these "files" or names do not exist on the website:

[Fri Jan 30 02:03:44 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!x/public_html/0xCkBIP5OZ3X7RcS4P3XAg==

[Fri Jan 30 02:04:00 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/C5Hx1U+TLcY4LcafGXkAzw==
[Fri Jan 30 19:59:07 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/2JhQSnIr

[Sat Jan 31 23:23:50 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/IeLo
[Sat Jan 31 23:23:59 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/86U01S4

[Sat Jan 31 23:24:24 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/gWhMLmit4s1L+fLopn3U
[Sat Jan 31 23:24:47 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/xUEE14lKGUHKcQmB2kN

[Sun Feb 01 07:54:07 2009] [error] [client 67.202.54.191] File does not exist: /home/#*$!#*$!/public_html/r5KMJjEVvIgKblTbaG2DAw==

67.202.54.191 belongs to Amazon.com.
Is this anything I should be worried about?

[incrediBILL]

I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like that before.

Perhaps it's testing your 404 responses?

[keyplyr]

It's Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Do a site search (at the very top.) Lots of questionable stuff coming from this "service."

[jdMorgan]

Compute Cloud is a nightmare, in that it is a service that dynamically assigns compute power (e.g. servers) to meet customer needs on an hourly basis. Therefore, since a host may belong to one customer one minute, and a different customer the next, Amazon does not bother supporting reverse-DNS because it would change so frequently. As a result, we Webmasters cannot check who these requests are coming from. All we can do is report abuse to Amazon, and hope they do something about it.

For me that's too much work given the number of questionable requests I see from their network, so I've simply banned Compute Cloud from my sites, and I'll live with the consequences.

YMMV,
Jim

[caribguy]

I remember seeing requests for random strings from China a while ago, but this is a new one:

66.249.66.nn - - [04/Feb/2009:03:19:09 -0600] "GET /rgjihzvrdtiqbz.html HTTP/1.1" 404 1296 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I'll check wmt in the next few days to see if it shows up.