Colocation America crawling my forum...?

[Cory]

Depends on how many different IP addresses the "bots" are coming as.

It has just been one IP address.

Here was the forum software owner's reply:

This IP address identifies itself as AwarioBot, which we have blocked in robots.txt but of course it doesn't listen. They claim it is harmless.

While I can't provide you the access logs for privacy policy reasons, I see no evidence that it's looking for vulnerabilities. This IP address is simply scanning pages. It does not have any patterns that we see when vulnerabilities are attempted to be exploited.

We see a lot of crawlers that are hosted on the Hetzner network and we actually have numerous blocks of Hetzner's datacenter banned for excessive crawling and/or exploitation attempts so this comes as no surprise.

I hope this gives you some insight as to what it is.

 

[Bryn]

And coincidentally, I got a reply from Colocation America, although just an email acknowledging that my request has been sent. A bit late, considering that their "bots" have buggered off from my forum... dunno if they were looking for vulnerabilities either

 

[Cpvr]

Depends on how many different IP addresses the "bots" are coming as... if you see like twenty different IP address ranges from them, then banning them one-by-one would be very difficult to do and also time-consuming as well.

You can block their entire zone if you’d like.

For example, if their IP address is 47.238.13.18, you can block the entire zone by using 47.238.13.*.





This way, any IP addresses within that range will be blocked, preventing them from accessing your forum.


Blocking a zone is much easier than blocking individual IP addresses manually.