IZSearch

[keyplyr]

UA: izsearch.com
Robots.txt: yes
Host: Cox Broadband Cable ISP
Range: 70.168.48.0 - 70.168.63.255 70.168.48.0/20

no issues

from their about page:

iZSearch is a general purpose search engine that finds and returns relevant web sites, images, videos and realtime results.

We offer a search service which does not retain or share any of your personal information. iZSearch does not download “cookies” onto people’s devices. It does not register the “IP address” which pinpoints a users computer. It does not "filter" search results. That is distinct from what other companies do. We are not anonymizing/encrypting the data. We actually throw it away - everything related to the user and anything that is personally identifiable.

By default, iZSearch shows only minimal ads at the bottom of the search results page. iZSearch does not sell data about you to third parties, including advertisers and data brokers.

[lucy24]

Robots' pages seem to be geared towards reassuring any potential users of their service. I wish they'd make a habit of also addressing a few words to the webmasters of the sites they crawl.

[dstiles]

If it's from a cable IP then a) it's someone playing or b) it's a distributed bot. Either way I would block it.

[keyplyr]

I've seen many upstart company's coming from ISP owned ranges. Maybe this is not the case in Britain, but Cox, like most US ISPs, has business ranges. In fact 16 years ago I served several sites from a home computer using Cox Business. Eventually it became cheaper and more affective to host them at server farms.

[keyplyr]

Update: got first referral from izsearch.com

[Pfui]

Hit twice in one day from same IP/Host. Same combo seen 19 times by Project Honey Pot installations since 03-28-15. [projecthoneypot.org...]

If it looks like a mothership and acts like a mothership -- this is its mothership:

wsip-70-167-8-42.sd.sd.cox.net
(70.167.8.42)

Happy it's pro robots.txt. Hate its spammy UA.

[keyplyr]

Personally, I don't see much value in project honeypot since I don't run a forum. Also, IMO there's a lot of misinformation input there due to the SPAM gag response.

[Pfui]

The still-free Project Honey Pot data is invaluable independent of forum-related activity -- they track harvesters, spammers, and dictionary attackers, as well as comment spammers. That's why I have Honey Pots installed on four specific IPs/sites and am also monitoring our CIDR. At the very least, PHP's records confirm that many of the iffy visitors I see are marauding elsewhere, too.

(Aside: Hmm. Perhaps a new thread of fave sites used in spider research might be timely.)

At the risk of veering further... What is a "SPAM gag response"?

[keyplyr]

Seems that whatever people don't like they will immediately label as SPAM and see nothing else, a form of profiling. Then the domino effect begins. I've seen legit businesses discard their domains, loosing their hard earned branding & have to start over because of getting on block lists at ISPs and netblocks unjustly.

This is why I see these report services (SPAMbot, HonetPot, etc) as irrelevant and make my judgements only from what I experience 1st hand. Even here in this forum, I never take bad bot reports as genuine without researching each and every one myself. There's just too much at stake.

[Pfui]

To each his own, of course. And determining what is/isn't can be a danged delicate balance. Just FWIW, Project Honey Pot's spam data is troublemaker-triggered.

The hidden honey pots are "custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it." [projecthoneypot.org...]

(SpamCop.net is recipient-submitted and thus subjective but when e-mails are forwarded, numerous checks and sources 'review 'the data before you click "Process Spam." I'm less familiar with Spamhaus.org but the two major ISPs where I have the bulk of my accounts use it to flag crap that's then sent on as "POSSIBLE SPAM." Etc.)

Oh-kay. Back to our regular programming, sorry!