Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Limited Bot?

[ichthyous]

My site has been hit up by IP 217.18.21.2, identified as "Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Limited". I think it's a bot because of the speed of the downloading of pages and the number of pages viewed and the images saved. Also, it's a Windows 10 machine...not likely for any real employee. I looked up the IP and it does identify as Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Limited in Hackney, UK. Does anyone know what this might be?

[not2easy]

Do your logs indicate a Python or Pcore UA?

[lucy24]

:: detour to logs ::

Haven't seen them, but searching for the element “Sony” I discover a double handful of robots whose UA contains the string “SonyEricsson”, either initially or somewhere later. (Out of sight, out of mind.) Clearly robots, because they are all blocked or 429'd, and never request anything but pages.

the number of pages viewed and the images saved

Do you mean that they're requesting images separate from the pages they belong to?

[ichthyous]

Very strange, I pulled the raw logs from server and it shows no such visit from the IP at all today. I also checked my other analytics app logs (Piwik) and no record of this visit at all today. But my analytics app Clicky shows it referred by Google, with an IP in London and pulling 75 pages and staying over 14 minutes. This is a mystery...how could one analytics app catch it, but no record on the server or the other analytics app?

[ichthyous]

Do you mean that they're requesting images separate from the pages they belong to?

No, they hit 75 pages in 14 minutes and then clicked on the images to see them larger so loaded in a s
separate browser window

[lucy24]

how could one analytics app catch it, but no record on the server or the other analytics app?

I don't know how clicky works, but piwik/matomo is primarily javascript-based. The visitor has to request the analytics file--or at least its <noscript> minimalist analogue--in the same way they have to request images and stylesheets. Robots almost never request analytics: after all, they rarely even request non-pages. Or, conversely, they request only the analytics file, intending to make you think they have visited, as in one form of referer spam. The latter is most common in third-party analytics such as GA, which isn't subject to sites' individual access controls.

In any case: if it isn't in your server access logs, they weren't really there.