I've been seeing a LOT of request to a script on my site, to the point of
being abusive. Requests come in several times (1-2/sec, at least 30 requests
total per period) for a short period of time, but repeatedly throughout the
day. One thing common to all these request is that it has this user-agent
string:

Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)

The other thing that is common is that the referrer, though an appropriate
URL of my site, is also faked, since I've renamed the file the original page
the script is called from, setup a rewrite rule to redirect any requests for
the old file to the new one, but the old file is still the referer in the
logs, when it should be the new page. So this leads me to believe that there
is some automated bot hitting my script pointlessly (since the result page
clearly states repeating the requests is pointless) for some reason.

What I'm wondering is if this might be called from a program, and not a
browser; something like an activex module or something similar that allows a
webbrowser to be embedded into a program designed for a specific function
(and obviously not well behaved). So my questions I guess would be:

1- Is this a known browser, and which one; and 2- Has there been any real
browsers that have had this exact agent string? (notice no platform or
version information usually found in real browsers' agent string)

Seb

"Sebastien B." <sebastien@nospam.nospam> writes:
> 1- Is this a known browser, and which one; and 2- Has there been any real
> browsers that have had this exact agent string? (notice no platform or
> version information usually found in real browsers' agent string)

It's a bot. The stuff in the user-agent string is because it's common
for scripts (server or client side) to just check for those keywords
when conditionalizing the output.