new bot called pscheclone hitting sites

[TechEvangelist]

There's a new bot with a user agent simpley acalled "psycheclone" that looks like it's hitting thousands of sites. It hit one of my sites twice this month.

I did a Web search and found thousands of log files with this user agent listed, but not much in the way of info about it. It uses a variety of IPs that mostly fall in the 208.66.195 range.

Does anyone know what this is? I suspect is is a scraper, but do not know for certain. There are a few posts I found in other forums where people are trying to figure this out, as well.

[jalika]

hi,

i am using webalizer for stats, under "Total User Agents" "psycheclone" listed, what is "psycheclone"??? is it a robot? if robot then which search engine?? or is it any spy???

jalika

[Jean-Luc]

I put some information about this psycheclone (http://www.internetofficer.com/web-robot/psycheclone.html) on my site about robots. That's all what I know for sure about it.

As no information is available from the owner, I do not expect this robot to be well-intended.:rolleyes:

Jean-Luc

[jalika]

oh thankyou for the info, so what shall i do now, block the ip or allow them to do again???

jalika

[Jean-Luc]

It is really up to you.

So far, it is not eating much bandwidth from my web sites. So I let it visit them. But if you prefer a safer approach (because you do not want it to read email addresses in your site), you can block the IP range.

Jean-Luc

[AdamSee]

It kept on revisiting my site over and over and over again. It was taking up a lot of bandwidth so I cut off it's IP range. No idea what it was, but it kept on going around in circles.

[mrtsays]

Anyone Know what psycheclone is? I have seen it poping up on a few of my sites? Any ideas?

[iatbm]

if you check google for that keyword some say it is bad. Block it since it is not googlebot :D

[TechEvangelist]

There is a lot of malicious activity out there these days. Based upon the name, I think it safe to assume it is a scraper or e-mail harvester.

Psycheclone appears to have been sneaking about for a couple of months, but no one seems to know what it is. I also blocked the IP range.

It looks like most visits are from one small ISP's C class. Other people are reporting a few other IPs, but it looks like blocking this group will cover most of it.

deny from 208.66.195. #psycheclone

Is anyone else seeing additional IP ranges that should be blocked?

[PashaM]

how would i ban the IP range? I editted my robots.txt file to disallow agent but dont know how to ban IPs.

[zoura]

Don't block it by editing robots.txt, but go to your control panel and choose IP deny; then enter the IP of psycheclone (208.66.195)

[wheel]

From what I read, it seems this bot is an email harvester.