Arachnida

a spider by any other name

[lucy24]

184.160.181.abc - - [17/Jul/2015:05:12:02 -0700] "HEAD /dir/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 200 330 "-" "Arachnida" 
184.160.181.abc - - [17/Jul/2015:05:12:02 -0700] "GET /dir/subdir/ HTTP/1.1" 200 5260 "-" "Arachnida" 

Oh, har har, yuk yuk. Does basic bot software now come with a "thesaurus" mod?

The address is a perfectly respectable Canadian ISP, though not one I'd associate with this particular directory. (I looked it up and found that the only previous visits to this subdirectory from this range were a cluster of robotic visits around a year ago, claiming to be FF 3.something. Huh.)

[Pfui]

Something may be afoot with videotron.ca (or one of its dynamic accountholders) because Arachnida came a crawlin' from nearby about a month ago:

184.160.50.ab
(modemcable0ab.50-160-184.mc.videotron.ca)

robots.txt? NO

Rarely see Arachnida but it's always ill-behaved. FWIW, prior months' hits came from a Los Angeles server farm (104.254.212.101) and a .nycmny.fios.verizon.net account.

Methinks the UA name dates back to at least the Netscape days, when 'spider' tie-ins were sorely abused.

[keyplyr]

This guy was probably using Win98.

[w3bmastine]

I was just visited by this spider. Not a canadian IP address, but british.

90.209.30.173 - - [31/Aug/2015:12:19:05 +0200] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 403 0 "-" "Arachnida"
90.209.30.173 - - [31/Aug/2015:12:19:05 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 745 "-" "Arachnida"

Maybe it is related to arachni-scanner.com. Which claims to be a feature-full, modular, high-performance Ruby framework aimed towards helping penetration testers and administrators evaluate the security of web applications.

...in other words, someone is scanning for your weaknesses.