Same IP switching UAs, over 7,000 404 errors

[smallcompany]

I just made a post under Apache hoping to get a suggestion for right solution about blocking IPs that create numerous 404s:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I thought I should report it here, with more UA oriented data.

The IP address was the same:

93.105.205.X

UA started with:

- Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET)

and picked non-existing URL (duplicate folder names and duplicate slashes) and then continued with

- Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7

- Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

...and so on...

What is this thing?

Thanks

[wilderness]

It's odd that this Class A should be your pest ;)

Many moons ago there was a participant here named "Marie" who simply advised that the easiest solution was to deny the 193., because too many pests came from there.

[keyplyr]

Polish ISPs do seem to harbor many pests. It may just be because broadband has monthly limits so some users may covertly (using UA switching software) DL entire web sites for future use, or it could be these pests are actually malicious.

I tend to ban by IP range for a week or so then check to see if they've revisited. If not, I remove the ban to save load time on my filters. If they come back a second time with the same bad behavior, they stay on the ban list.

[dstiles]

Probably more on the lines of their OS's being more easily compromised so they are unwittingly acting as botnets.

An interesting note in a Semantic security blog: a major portion of compromised machines are trojan'd because they are using pirated copies of MS operating systems (presumably XP and Vista). MS will not let them automatically patch the OS and they are slow to do so manually.

Poland wasn't included in the top ten Pirate/Infection chart although Russia was.

I find I get more suspect web access attempts from ukraine than from poland. And more from USA than anywhere.