I've just banned these fellows in htaccess. The bot was all over my forum, 2-4 page loads per minute. It's not Googlebot, it's not Yahoobot, it's not MSNbot, I don't need them. I read somewhere that the bot name is psycheclone. According to some source, their REAL headquarters are in Moscow... not good. The word on the street appears to be that it is a sinister bot, a harvester.
In order to be safe I would add the entire IP range that this host is using.. also add order allow,deny deny from 208.66.192. deny from 208.66.193. deny from 208.66.194. but beware, blocking them at the .htaccess file, they will still gobble up bandwidth, as now they are being redirected to your 403 page ... for those of you that can access your servers iptables iptables -I INPUT -m iprange --src-range 208.66.192.0-208.66.195.255 -j DROP is their entire IP range -Jeff
Yep, this rogue bot is killing me too! Question, since I'm not too technically advanced: Where do I block it in the htaccess file? This is what mine looks like: <Limit GET POST> order deny,allow deny from all allow from all </Limit> <Limit PUT DELETE> order deny,allow deny from all </Limit> Could someone please post as to which lines I should change? Thanks!
Here's an insight as to what this bot may be up to: http://www.donsausa.com/2006/06/psycheclone-annoying-web-bot-advisory.html And I recently wondered why I have been getting so much spam in the last month or so for Viagra & Forex sites!
They are pulling a lot of pages of my sites as well. I've contacted my webhost and they have added the ip range to the servers deny list so I don't have to update the .htaccess for each of my sites.
McColo Corporation are really becoming well known - check out the Google Results for their name - wonder if this thread will over take 1st position
From the little snooping around, I found that this IP address actually belongs to a proxy server and is regularly being used for unleashing DOS attacks...the user has also tried at numerous occasions to use WebDAV to gain control of the website... I would recommend use of the microsoft tool URLScan which would block everything besides the primary purpose of the website thus making it more secure.. Also, block this IP...BLOCK IT NOW !!
I banned 208.66.195 from all my sites. Now the bot is using 208.66.194.XX This time, instead of doing it for each individual site, I just e-mailed my host and asked them to block this IP. You guys better check your stats for 208.66.194 and maybe 208.66.193 and 208.66.192 too.