back to article Four fake Google haxbots hit YOUR WEBSITE every day

One in every 24 Googlebots is a imitation spam-flinging denial of service villain that masquerades as Mountain View to sneak past web perimeter defences, according to security chaps at Incapsula. Villains spawn the "evil twins" to hack and crack legitimate websites and form what amounted to the third most-popular type of DDoS …

  1. DN4
    FAIL

    Want keep something inaccessible for the general public? Don't let search engines index it either! It's really simple and you won't piss off people.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Exactly my thoughts as well.

      I run a blog that is well... not exactly about a mainstream topic. It contains my stories that all have this theme. Not Porn or even overtly sexual but it is still enough for one of the major UK ISPs to block it and not be able to supply a reason for that decision.

      I keep all bots, spiders and crawlers out yet I get on average 500 hack attacks a week. The site is not known to Google, Bling etc yet still they come. sigh.

      I shudder to think what it would be like if I cared about my SEO ratings and let Google index it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Exactly my thoughts as well.

        Am I on a different planet?

        1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
          Alien

          Re: Exactly my thoughts as well.

          Yes!

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Exactly my thoughts as well.

        Bling? Is that the search engine that uses a lot of Flash?

  2. This post has been deleted by its author

  3. Pete Spicer

    What's really funny is that it's even easier than ever to identify the bad bots from the good because the bad guys haven't noticed that the physical GET requests have different headers to what they used to have several years ago.

  4. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    What's the big deal?

    Security isn't a hobby that you only worry about if the search engines are indexing you - there have been fake spiders out there for years.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What's the big deal?

      You're right, but that's only part of the problem. What Incapsula failed to state (or wasn't quoted in the article) was the TOTAL number of requests from Google's (and Bings, etc) polling engines.

      I've had sites polled by more than 4 separate googlebots in a relatively short timeframe.

  5. Allan George Dyer
    Paris Hilton

    "third most-popular type of DDoS attack"

    Who runs these DDoS popularity contests?

    "And our next contestant is sporting an off-the standard GET request with unusual headers..."

    Surely prevalent is a more appropriate word in this context.

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