Installed this RSS feed reader called Active Web Reader on the Vista laptop the other day and it went off hammering my server with requests from "IEAutoDiscovery" that resembled a fucking DoS on one of my websites.
At first I thought I'd just been fucked over with malware in the download until I remembered what it said on their web site:
"Active Web Reader has a unique feature, called Auto Discovery, that automatically discovers RSS feeds while you browse the Internet using Internet Explorer."Auto Discovery my ass, this is Auto Denial of Service attack!
xx.xx.xx - - [17:53:40] "GET /somepage.html" "IEAutoDiscovery"Maybe it malfunctioned in Vista, who knows, because I've never seen IEAutoDiscovery run amok like this before, but in less than 40 minutes this fucking thing pulled down 647 pages when the site has less than 50. That means this tool kept hammering the same pages over and over and over, ever hear of the word CACHE?
... shitload of requests sometimes hitting 2 and 3 pages per second
xx.xx.xx - - [18:31:17] "GET /somepage.html" "IEAutoDiscovery"
Fuck me.
Uninstalled and I'll never touch anything from them again.
1 comment:
Good god. someone browsing my friend's small TYCO RC tribute website with this thing active would make the little homemade server explode.
So, how long until websites/companies sneak crawling software into IE toolbars to to the crawling dirty work in a distributed basis while one browses, unaware?
*shudders*
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