Microsoft Hong Kong (plainclothes)

[keyplyr]

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv: 11.0) like Gecko
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Robots.txt: No
Host: Microsoft
168.61.0.0 - 168.63.255.255
168.61.0.0/16, 168.62.0.0/15

I see quite a few covert agents from M$, always have, but usually they hit a few images files or a couple pages and disappear. This agent crawled all HTML files on my site, no other requests for supporting files - just like a SE bot would. My notes from about 10 years ago say this range is M$ Hong Kong but the range is not listed as crawl, at least not in the sources I checked.

[dstiles]

I have a note that I blocked 168.61.0.0/16 at the firewall (as against usual web-site dynamic blocking) exactly two years ago due to excessive activity (hundreds of hits within minutes).

[wilderness]

There's a 2014 thread [webmasterworld.com] on this (MS Hosting)

[lucy24]

Heh. I didn't recognize the IP, but pulled up notes and found 168.61-63 blocked with a notation saying, quote, "blocked pending information to the contrary". Notes also say, for various specific IPs, "botnet" "robot" "occasional image request".

:: detour to multi-file search for time frame ::

Humanoid visit as recently as July; robot claiming to be MSIE 6 two years ago; various stuff in the course of 2013.

[keyplyr]

There's a 2014 thread [webmasterworld.com] on this (MS Hosting)

MS Hosting (Azure Cloud Services) is 168.63.0.0/16
The hits I got were from 168.61.0.0/16 which I have noted as MS Hong Kong. But as I noted above, I really don't know as I can't find current specific information.