The 2013 User Agent Blacklist blocks hundreds of the worst bots while ensuring open-access for normal traffic, major search engines (Google, Bing, et al), and everyone else. Compared to blocking threats by IP, blocking by user-agent is more effective as a general security strategy. Although it’s trivial to spoof any user agent, many bad requests continue to report user-agent strings that are known to be associated with malicious activity. For example, the notorious “httrack” user agent has been widely blocked since at least 2007, yet it continues to plague sites to this day. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter if it’s the […]
via Perishable Press 2013 User Agent Blacklist