cable.net.co Content Scraper: Research, Ban
You never know what you will find in your travels. dynamic-ip-181500198200.cable.net.co was content scraping me, so I decided to target it. It is part of the large Semalt botnet that started with keywords-monitoring-your-success.com and free-video-tool.comand then continued with fix-website-errors, with a sprinkling of buttons-for-websites thrown in.
Its host name is unique in that it is numerically very long. I could see remnants of a decimal IP address, but there was something odd.
Their pattern is not as predictable as required by a computer but that is precisely the point: They want to fool anti-bot software, but allow their admin staff to figure it out. If staff have a couple of errors it is no problem.