Are spammers able to "fake" their user agent?

Nash · Regular Joined: Jan 10, 2006 Posts: 86

Sentinel again caught Googlebot. Looks like it was trying to run malicious code.

I suspect that either a hacker/spammer was faking user agent as Googlebot/2.0 or a hack/spammer placed a link to this code that Google then crawled.

71.253.62.11 User ID: Anonymous (1)
Reason: Abuse-Filter
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User Agent: Googlebot/2.0 (http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)

Query String:

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astbodybo arding.com/modules.php?name=h t

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[spaces added b/c it was getting blocked]

Gremmie · Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2008 4:56 pm

Yes, the user agent is easy to spoof.

evaders99 · Moderator Joined: Apr 30, 2004 Posts: 2847

Yep. Too easily spoofed.
That IP goes to someone using Verizon Smile

Susann · Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 4:11 am

Its not only the UA real spammers don´t use normally their own IP address. There are enough, different services available to hidde the own IP address.
Also its cool and a kind of trend to fake the user agent.