Robot keeps making suspicious page requests

halfpower · 06-04-2015, 07:49 PM

I have a web page that receives up to, at least, 130 GET requests per day from a robot. It's using different IP addresses. The robot is also sending user agent strings typical of a legit web surfer. The page is static, and there seems to be no room for injection attacks. It's also not enough traffic for a DOS attack. Any idea what this robot might be doing?

ugjka · 06-05-2015, 03:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by halfpower

I have a web page that receives up to, at least, 130 GET requests per day from a robot. It's using different IP addresses. The robot is also sending user agent strings typical of a legit web surfer. The page is static, and there seems to be no room for injection attacks. It's also not enough traffic for a DOS attack. Any idea what this robot might be doing?

It could be Scraping, Trying to register to spam, Trying to exploit security holes.

I'm running a forum and 99% of robots try to register to spam the board.

TenTenths · 06-05-2015, 08:37 AM

How can you identify it's a robot? If you can do that then you should be able to write a fail2ban recipe to ban the IP address when you see the suspicious activity.

More worrying are robots making POST requests as they are the ones that are usually trying to automagically register.

joec@home · 06-05-2015, 10:48 AM

Have you checked the whois of the IP address of the bot to ensure it is not a legitimate web crawler from a search engine such as Google?

smallpond · 06-05-2015, 11:33 AM

Check referer log to see if there is a link to your site.

halfpower · 06-08-2015, 01:32 PM

All of the IP addresses point back to the same web hosting company. The access logs contain no referrer. I would think if it were a legit web crawler, then it would properly identify itself rather than masquerading with different user-agent strings. It is not yet too threatening, but it is strange. Requests are spaced, on average, 15 minutes apart. In some cases, my access logs have shown two practically simultaneous page requests from two slightly different IP addresses.

joec@home · 06-08-2015, 02:27 PM

You might want to send a report to the abuse department of that web hosting company, they might have been infected with a botnet. No need to make accusations, just give a sample of the logs you are seeing and explain the traffic looks suspicious, let them handle it from there.