3 ms·
As one small data point: I've been running this experiment (another comment). While bots continuously hammer on port 22 (ssh), and repeatedly try to get things
by sixplusone 7y ago
As one small data point:
I've been running this experiment (another comment). While bots continuously hammer on port 22 (ssh), and repeatedly try to get things like /wp-* (I don't even run PHP), they don't bother fetching robots.txt in the first place, and my honeypot hasn't a single hit.
Definitely do not try to "secure" your site this way, but bots are either not sophisticated enough to analyze the .txt, or it might already be a known technique. Seems many other commenters come up with the same idea.
- mjbmitch 7y agoIf you're an adversary trying to snoop on port 22, why would you bother to respect the conventions of robot.txt to begin with?
- sixplusone 7y agoNot necessarily the same bot. And they're not snooping so much as brute-forcing default/common/random(?) usernames & passwords.